Here’s a present from World Machine to play with on Christmas Morning. 
World Machine LTE
‘Artist Point’ Development Build
Build 4030
Build 4030 is the second Dev Channel release of the new ‘Artist Point’ version of World Machine. This build is anticipated to be the production release version of Artist Point.
Artist Point is a major upgrade that brings Physically Based Rendering to World Machine. Create worlds and materials in PBR, import your existing texture libraries, and easily export all scene elements in one click using glTF.
Build 4030 brings some significant improvements, including optional curved workview wires, improved device functions, performance improvements, bugfixes, and more. In particular, Tiled Builds are now fully supported by the mesh and material workflows.
Artist Point Overview
- Author, view, and export PBR-based materials
- Export entire scenes using glTF, and create optimized meshes with tangentspace normals
- Powerful new texturing devices
- Many useful device improvements, including spatially-varying parameters and the powerful new Strata device
What’s new in Build 4030
General
- Added curved wire routing mode. 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 presets to viewport lighting
- Tiled builds support materials, mesh device
- Added a background coloration and tooltip for parameters that support “out of slider range” direct value entry
- Added experimental “rainbow highlighting” feature; selecting devices colors each data packet uniquely
- Added experimental orthogonal-only wire routing mode
- Memory conservation mode changes:
- Conservation no longer affects preview builds
- Despite the above, macros DO in fact conserve even their previews if the internal world is not visible.
- Checkpoint-based conservation now implemented. Checkpoints will hold onto their high-res data, allowing ‘high’ memory conservation to have to only rebuild 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.
- Turned back on 8x MSAA for device workview
- Materials (and scenes using them) can be Explored
- Clicking again on a selected port toggles back to default output
- 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
Devices
- Scene Output now auto-converts water to a mesh if water is supplied
- Strata device now has spatial params exposed for tilt and heading of strata. This is very useful!
- 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)
- Library Output, Checkpoint use “expanding” port type
- Water and Selector devices now automatically display water/mask overlaid on terrain
- Report color, height now have mask inputs for computing only sub-areas of their input
- Guide water level added to Report Extents
- Equalizer “output range” parameter rearranged to be more logical, “Target” input now supports RGB targets.
- Adjust Color now clips out-of-gamut colors better
- Performance Improvements: Changed optimization and cache blocking behavior, as well as no-transform performance. Some devices strongly improved (Thermal Erosion up to twice as fast!)
- Crop device now supports shift for constrained-to-square cropping
- Crystalize device finalized, supports distortion, rotation of the crystal pattern, better sampling of underlying values, RGB inputs, “height percentage” adv. param
- Height/Slope selectors support spatial falloff
- Facing/Roughness/Convex selectors support spatial params as appropriate
- Added icons for new devices
- Added several new Material macros, including the very handy “Rock Material”
Bugfixes
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Fixed bug in Equalizer where it was not capturing/storing saimple data in AP version
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Fixed subtle visual offset error when displaying terrain
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Fixed bug where lighting device following the viewport lighting would cause all devices to invalidate
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Add noise now applies mask even if no input supplied
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Fixed bug in River device that wasn’t updating old river system quite right
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Fixed bug in River device that caused GCSes to disappear when mem conserved was enabled
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Down-sampled results no longer lose their special flags (unlit, mask, etc)
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Fixed bug where meshify wasn’t masking water
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Colorizer no longer forgets show colorpick mode/alpha between changes
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Fixed bug in colorizer color picker where the direct entry boxes weren’t being properly adjusted for HSL/HSV modes
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Fixed issue in Combiner causing incorrect masking introduced in 4028
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Macros now flag as un-tilable if they contain untilable devices.
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Fixed issue where some route points were un-connectable
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AO device is now a tex/material device not a filter, as it functionally belongs there.
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Fixed crop device aspect ratio bug
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Fixed crop device visual editor behavior under rotation
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Cleaned up UI program options tab (mouse inversions wasn’t even hooked up, so just removed for now)
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Fixed a major performance issue in the Instancer Tiler and multi-core processing. On my 16-core threadripper, the Instance Tiler in standard mode went from ~20s at 8k to 2s.
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Fixed crop device shouldn’t have mask input
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Fixed bug where A|B view would not show currently selected port as B, just the default output
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Fixed a couple small bugs in workview UI
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Fixed workview routing bug for parameter inputs
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Fixed workview legacy wiring issue
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Fixed issue when loading older Material packets
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Fixed scene water always being off on load
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Fixed accidental mishandling of water depth on display
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Fixed bug where automatic tap device additions weren’t invalidating the world
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Fixed bug where workview wasn’t cancelling a stuck action on undo/redo
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Fixed bug in tile merging
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Fixed reporting of size of tiles for non-square aspects
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Fixed macro actions only being sent to first target if more than one is connected
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Tweaked contour line fade-out distance
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Tweaked library dialog tree size to show all example filenames off the bat
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Tweaked build status dialog to show when results removed from mem conserve
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Tweaked scene water to not waste flow dots in still water areas
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Tiled build filename template resolution strings now use their tile/merge res, not the irrelevant normal res
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Meshify can show up as an add-target when wiring from water
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Additional error reporting in tiled build/merges
Crash Bugfixes
- Fixed crash bug when inserting device into wire that doesn’t support that datatype
- Fixed crash bug for dissimilar sized inputs in Overlay view
- Fixed crash bug in Scene Output when only an AO map (but no roughness/metal) was supplied
- Fixed crash bug that would sometimes occur after a build. This was the most-frequently-reported remaining bug in 4xxx builds!
- Fixed race condition in framework threading code that could cause subtle crash issues
- Fixed crash bug when flipping large data packets
- Fixed bug where double-clicking a route point would accidently remove it sometimes (and rarely, cause a crash)
Remaining Issues
- Optimized mesh doesn’t support water bottom