Amazing terrain - but textures?

Bug Reports
#1

So I am test driving World Machine right now. I overlooked it about a year ago because I thought it would be too complex but its really not too difficult to create some amazing terrain.

I did have to fix the exported obj in Ultimate Unwrap to make it usable elsewhere. Bug?

The question I have is this, what are people using to create their textures if WM doesn’t really create them? Are you guys using a different program? Hand painting them in some other software?

I am creating a graphic novel and have been hard at work on characters, props, etc. I will be putting it all together in DazStudio 4.
My budget is practically non-existent so if I need to pay for the standard version of World Machine that leaves me little else to go with it.
Suggestions? I’ve tried other terrain software and this really seams to be the best for my needs. Just not sure what to do about textures.

Also, any thoughts on realistic tree creation on a tight budget. At this point I am thinking I will need to go the billboard route for most vegetation - any good and versatile 2D tree & plant creation methods?

But for close-ups of trees that characters may interact with, any ideas? Fairly realistic but inexpensive software…

Thanks in advance,
Scott

Edit: I see I may be wrong in my understanding of no WM textures - at least partially wrong. Colors by altitude, yes? But that is not really the same as a texture… Any videos showing some simple terrain creation and texture work?

#2

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the colourize tool in conjunction with perlin can be used to generate a texture, which can be joined together with many other colourizer nodes using height choosers and slope choosers to get a rather interesting result. the image here is a very quick example of such. i also uploaded a macro that generates quite interesting and believable textures with can be edited in photoshop.

the best way to achieve a texture is to export several textures from WM: a heightmap, a flow map, wear map, depo map, AO map and lightmap, and photoshop them together to get a nice result. my macro in the libraries entitled “comprehensive terrain” shows a good example of how to achieve this thanks to the coastal overlay macro.

#3

Hi there,

Check out some of the examples included in your World Machine documents folder ( World Machine Documents\ examples\ RGB examples ) You should find several worlds that show the basic process of texturing.

A good starter world is the “(RGB) Basic Texturing Example.tmd” file in that folder.

You are absolutely not restricted to shade-by-height. In fact, the best textures will be using a wide variety of input data, including talus and wear outputs from the erosion node, etc.

The “Basic Coverage” macro is often handy to many people to make some simple but powerful textures; Go to the Macro toolbar tab and then load it from your macro library.

#4

Thanks Remnant $ Construc

#5