When saving my heightmap from World Machine as a 16bit tiff file and then re-importing back into Mudbox 2014 there’s a checkerboard effect that’s being applied to my terrain that wasn’t present inside of WM.
Is this due to artifacts in the file format? If so, is it possible to save as a 32bit RGBA tif instead of only 16? Maybe this would solve the problem?
Otherwise does anyone else know why this is happening?
Thanks!
This happens with me too. And no, 32 bit tiff won’t solve this problem. Could someone please explain this?
Hi,
Are you certain that the artifacts are not apparent within WM itself?
Sometimes erosion with geological time enhancement can cause this kind of edge effect under certain settings. If you have access to 3.0.dev1, try switching to the “Consistent (Smooth Ridged)” reconstruction type in the erosion - GTE settings box.
It might be… I’ll have to look more closely at the file but I’m pretty sure its not present in WM. How do I get access to WM3? I bought WM2 standard.
Yes this is apparent within world machine preview as well.
Yes I can confirm its definitely present in WM just a lot more subtle to notice with the lighting…
So how do we fix it?
Bump.
So TorQueMoD, didn’t Remnant’s reply on 22 October help you out?
Yes, that’s very helpful, TorQueMoD.
Have you tried changing any of the erosion settings? Actually, let me widen my question. What have you tried?
I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, I thought maybe you missed it. Remnant’s suggestion was to try switching to the “Consistent (Smooth Ridged)” reconstruction type in WM3 dev. Then you asked if I tried what he suggested but I obviously can’t do that if I don’t know how to get WM3 dev which is why my follow up reply to his post was “how do I do that?”. I was simply waiting on Remnant’s reply as I know he’s really busy being the primary designer and likely the only support staff that WM has.
I’ve tried playing around with tweaking the settings on the current erosion preset that I’m using but I really don’t want the scene to look too much different than it currently does as I like the overall look. Beyond that I really don’t know what else I CAN do to smooth out only the sharp lines and not drastically change the overall look of the environment.
Here’s something you might try. Instead of doing all the erosion in one device, with fairly cranked up settings, try doing the erosion by a series of two or three devices, each with lower settings.
Without access to your scene, I can’t say for sure you can preserve the look you want, but it’s something I would try.
I tried that too, doesn’t work that well. Developer build is the only way to go.
Unfortunately, the same artifact that gives your settings their character are also causing the linear ridges. The 3.0 dev build (download from http://update.world-machine.com, by the way, as is linked in every news post about it) has a new “smooth ridged” reconstruction type that will get rid of the ridges, although it will also change the character of the erosion in ways you might not like.
The basic two solutions are:
I don’t use the dev build, I like to work on stable systems. Would it be worth it? I would rather wait for the final build. Current erosion works okay for me. There’s a workaround.
Make two terrains with similar but not twin profile. Perform erosion on one and keep the other as is. Then use simple displacement filter, eroded terrain in first port, un-eroded one in the second. Distort slightly using mirror features mode. Works for most terrain profiles, specially mountains. After setting up the terrain, copy the simple displacement filter, and apply the same process to the erosion outputs, to align them perfectly.
Thanks for all the feedback guys. I’ll play around with it when I get some free time.
