World Machine LTE
‘Artist Point’
Build 4031 Final
Artist Point is a major upgrade that brings Physically Based Rendering to World Machine. Create worlds using PBR materials, import your existing texture libraries, and easily export all scene elements in one click using glTF.
Overview
At a high level, Artist Point lets you:
- Author, view, and export PBR-based materials
- Export entire scenes using glTF, and create optimized meshes with tangentspace normals
- Introduces powerful new texturing devices
- Updates many devices, including spatially-varying parameters and the powerful new Strata device
In Depth
General Features
- Spatially-varying Parameters. Some device parameters can now be varied across the terrain by providing a heightfield, changing a single value into a range.
- Added curved workview wires. This is the new default, but you can enable/disable in Program Settings->UI.
- Added workview overlay visualizations. Devices are colored with a heatmap, so you can quickly see where your build time, memory usage, or tiling issues are coming from.
- Added “ribbon-cable highlighting” feature; selecting devices colors each data packet uniquely
- Universal generator transforms - you can rotate any generator directly in its parameter dialog
- Device parameter inputs hidden by default in workview. Connect to a parameter by wiring to the device itself.
- Device parameter dialogs now remember their previous geometry when re-opening
- Reduced memory usage in complex networks, some minor speed improvements
- Added new memory conservation modes - Minimal, which removes data from unused ports only. High, which removes all data except from Checkpoints and Outputs. Checkpoints will hold onto their high-res data, allowing rebuilds only from the last checkpoint. Devices behind a checkpoint will have their ‘Conserved’ status removed when a world change requires it to be rebuilt, but will otherwise be skipped during a build.
Small Changes
- Turned back on 8x MSAA for device workview
- Build times are now reporting in ms on fast builds
- Adjusting rescaler tweak parameter now updates preview
- Added “visual editor” icon to device params when the device has a unique editor for the layout view (currently seen for Crop, Create Water devices)
- New groups automatically get a gentle coloration instead of always being medium-gray
- Added “automatic tap” behavior when adding a device atop a composite wire (in addition to being able to drag onto or wire onto)
- Quick-add uses exclusive toggles rather than checkboxes now, which is more likely to be what you want
- Improved reporting of multiple datatype ports in UI
- In toolbars or menus, the data type(s) that a device can process are now displayed in the tooltip.
- Added automatic cleanup of temporary files on next startup after a crash
- Added a background coloration and tooltip for parameters that support “out of slider range” direct value entry
- Added error message for ‘blocked by firewall’ licensing errors
- Device parameter view resizes to be larger when previously unshown parameters appear
- Changed Scene Setup to not require a ctrl-drag on a render extent to move
Viewport Changes
- Configurable viewport lighting - select from menu, or right-click on lighting toggle in sidebar. Adjust colors, exposure, fog, etc. Includes presets.
- New global toggle to display color/material.
- Tile overlay guide
- Contour Lines overlay guide
- Physically based rendering used in 3D views
- Viewports now display water using an animating PBR water material
- Workview: When wiring/dragging onto a wire containing a composite type, WM will automatically prompt if you’d like to tap a specific channel
- Workview: When wiring/adding into a wire, the set of devices displayed into the quick add window are filtered by the wire’s datatype
- 2D View: now shows a list of channels when viewing a composite type (water, material, etc)
- Added ‘Copy Viewport Image’ command to quickly copy a screenshot of the active viewport to the clipboard.
- Re-added mesh wireframe display
- Compositing devices like the Scatter and Layers device can now show partially-transparent results in the 3d viewports
New Devices and Upgrades
PBR Material/Color Related
- Material (New) - Define a PBR material. Can load maps from disk or create from input maps.
- Material Output (New). Output all channels of a PBR texture with a single device.
- Layer Combiner (New). This is an extremely useful new tool that lets you blend together many inputs in one place with a Photoshop-style layer interface, instead of chaining Choosers. Abilities include:
- Full compositing support for partially-masked layers
- Layer Over, Layer Under, and Add blending modes
- Two heightblending modes (heightblend replace and heightblend merge) These are incredibly useful to create convincing blends with materials, but can also be used and are quite powerful when supplied with height or bitmap inputs.
- Levels (New) - Similar to Photoshop tool, adjust domain, range, midtones of heights or colors
- Tint (New) - Adjust an input so that it averages to the given color. Quite powerful color adjustment tool!.
- Crop/Transform (New) - Take a section of an existing packet as a new packet. Can transform/repeat boundaries
- Adjust Color (New) - Colorize and adjust hue/sat/bright
- Normals Combiner (New). Properly combine two normal maps by doing the necessary vector rotations to produce accurate results.
- Create Normals - Supports tangent space normal maps, and has a convenient OpenGL/DX toggle
- Instance Tiling - Gains support for Materials and new ‘Random Tile’ mode
- Instance Scatter - Gains support for Materials, Variations of Size/Rotation/Opacity
- Channel Split/Combine - New support for LAB & HCL channels
- Splatmap/Weightmap device can now optionally export a RGBA splatmap directly, rather than forcing you to jump through hoops.
- Meshify (New) - Converts heightfield to Mesh for later export. Supports highly optimized mesh generation and automatically creates a tangentspace normalmap for the mesh.
- Scene Output (New) - Export an entire scene via the glTF format (possibly other formats in the future)
- Masked View (New) - View any texture or heightfield with an alpha cutout applied to it
Other Device Improvements
- Basic Noise - New version supports solid noise, spatial params
- Crystallize (new) - Create columns taking their height from the input. Supports square/hex shapes
- Combiner has new version with 3 RGB blend modes (Lum/Color/Hue), soft min/max support, and a useful input inversion option
- Colorizer now has perceptual HSL option (lab colorspace)
- Clamp - gains a Histogram report
- Gradient - New tiling mode, curve variable inputs for height/width, spatial params
- Library Output, Checkpoint use “expanding” port type* Equalizer - Supports RGB, new Distribution parameter lets you set to Uniform, Gaussian, Log-Normal, or Exponential distributions. Very very useful!
- Report Color/Height/Extents - Analyze an input and extract valuable information such as the average color, minimum height, etc
- Re-added “track viewport lighting” to Lighting Generator (renamed Bake Lighting). If this is enabled, adjusting viewport lighting will trigger a history entry and the lighting information in the generator will be updated.
- Radial Gradient - New types, ‘repeating’ checkbox
- Scene View gets shadowmap input - feed it a shadow-only output from the lighting generator to have raytraced shadows in your viewport
- Strata (New) - very powerful new device; Etch strata detail using horizontal displacements into the terrain. Also produces addt’l masks for the strata
- Snow - added new simple mask output
- Spatial parameters added to various devices in smaller ways
- Tap - Replace or extract an individual channel from a composite datatype
- Voronoi - New version with solid noise input, ‘Crystallize’ mode
- Water and Selector devices now automatically display water/mask overlaid on terrain