Hey there folks, complete newbie to World Machine and your fine forums here.
A year or so ago I was involved in the creation of a Minecraft server. Initially, I designed the world by hand using a program called World Painter, and proceeded to work off of that. However the mountains, rivers, forests, etc were all done by hand also, and thus were rather sketchy and quite unrealistic.
A week ago, I was introduced to this fine program on Youtube, via Jamziboy, who did an interesting tutorial on how to use the program. Imitating him, I eventually created a fairly decent world - that said, it’s of poor standard compared to most I’ve seen here so far! Sadly, he didn’t go into detail about the usage of the program, and I have had problems loading the User Guide for some reason. Right now, I’m looking elsewhere for it.
My problem is thus; can I import an image, included below at a smaller resolution than the original, as flat terrain and work off that in World Machine, creating new mountains, rivers, and such?
I’ve re-designed the world above to the new image, included below. Sadly, there is a very sheer drop-off when importing it into World Machine. I’m wondering how I can safely edit this new map, to generate mountain ranges, rivers, canyons and such, then export the new heightmap?
I would take the mask shape you have below, import it using a File Input device and then use a Blur device to blur the borders.
After that, you might get some ideas from the example file:
File->Open Example World->New for WM 2.3->Scenes->Island with Mountains and Lowlands
Which shows how to combine several different terrain types using Layouts.
For your purposes, you would replace the “Island Shape” layout generator in the example with your imported outline, and then positions your mountains, etc using layouts (“Perlin Mask”) as shown in the example file.
If you need more ideas, there are many other example files showing this technique, including:
“Coastal Mountains” under Scenes
“Combining Terrain Types” 1 and 2 under Techniques
“Height Chooser Scene” under Techniques (this is more complicated, but shows how to manage several types of terrain and merge them together)
Hey there, Stephen. Thank you so much for your reply!
I’ll give it a go as soon as the power is back on; that’s Scottish electricity for you (hah!), as I’m afraid my simple laptop wouldn’t handle the rendering of the map that big.
The next issue, once I get settled into the editing, will be the scale of the thing. The original map, that is the colour one above, and the black/white one are both bigger than 10k pixels. I’m wondering how that might factor into Minecraft.
But I digress; thank you for the reply, Stephen, and I’ll do my best to be worthy to submit the finished render here! Any other tips would happily be welcomed.
Keep in mind your image has only two colors so WM can only assign two heights: high and low. So the cliffs will be shear. Try paining a gray circle somewhere in the middle of the black area and see what you get.
I gave Stephens method a go and it turned out extremely well. The cliffs are, as you’ve said, sheer - but the blur device smooths them out substantially. I’ve already rendered the map into World Painter, and by extension Minecraft, and the result so-far is quite astounding and realistic, if I may say so.
Currently, the map is scaled to 90km[sup]2[/sup] and I’ve only added the mountains and lowlands present in that example. However, I’m left wondering if there’s something I could do better.
I plan to expand the map to a larger size, as it was initially designed to be continent-sized instead of smaller islands. I’m thinking around 230,000km[sup]2[/sup] - the rough size of Great Britain. Is this easily achieved in World Machine, as the largest preview I’ve ever done was around 200km. Feature-wise, what should the hills/mountains/lakes etc. look like? Does anybody have any examples of where to place them realistically?
I’m constricted by a height limit of 255 meters in Minecraft, which will limit heightmap imports into the program. I’ll get into that after some replies. The basic idea is to have plenty of up-height to build, but also keep plenty of down-height to mine and search. I’ll look into methods of changing the height for now.
EDIT: Just discovered that the limit for a Minecraft map is 30,000,000 meters squared, thus reducing my planned map size to around 30000km[sup]2[/sup]. That’s including water to the border. I can, however, freely edit the height with a quick config edit. At least, after the world is built and hosted.
