Originally published at: Beyond Heightfields – World Machine Development Blog
I think we need to jump straight to the marquee feature for Dragontail Peak that I’ve been working on for the last two years. 
Simply this: for the first time World Machine will be able to generate and manipulate non-heightfield terrain! This is a screenshot from Dragontail Peak. This is a single terrain surface,…
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Stoked! and mind boggling!!!
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YOOOO
did someone notice skymap usage for background?
if it is screenshot inside wm
so skymaps is also will be a new feature?
YOOOOOOOOOO
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I’m extremely interested to see how this affects erosion! From my understanding of vector displacement (which is extremely basic, so I’m super interested in hearing the details if I’m completely off base!) we’re mostly just considering the surface/skin of the terrain, so I’m interested to see how cutting into it can be affected. It would be extremely cool, for example, if 3D noise patterns could be used to have differing rock hardness at different depths!
Out of further curiosity, on the surface, this seems very similar to Terragen’s approach to terrain generation and manipulation. If that’s the case, does this open up the door to a more native export to Terragen for renders? Maybe not full clip networks, but perhaps a bit less restrictive than heightmap output?
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Yes - i skipped the viewport changing coming up to go straight to VDMs, but one of them is the ability to put an HDRI skybox into the viewport! Which also replaces the prior simple sky lighting term with environment lighting from the skybox.
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All of the VDM erosion paths are still in heavy dev work right now - they work but are not final. But yes - the VDM defines the terrain surface but not anything volumetric inside of it.
In terms of 3D structure of the underlying rock, I totally agree that it would be really cool to have 3D noise patterns for hardness/structure as the rock erodes. Some simple procedural patterning would be possible; for right now, the options are uniform or random noise.
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It’s absolutely amazing!
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