Hi
I’m fairly new to terrain and am trying to export a heightmap and texture for use in a 3d game engine.
I can’t find any option to create texture files for terrain in World Machine. How do I do this?
Thanks
Neil
Hi Neil,
Currently, you can’t export textures… In fact, right now WorldMachine doesn’t know what “texture” is… You can only export heightmaps…
Now if have an image editor program you might think of doing something else… a Heightmap is a greyscale image… you can use such image to use as mask for a texture… so you can composite several textures (images) based on masks generated by WM.
But at the present time, there is no specific texture support in WM… That justifies you not finding it 
Cheers,
Neil,
Sorry for the quick reply… I was didn’t have much time to answer you… I forgot to mention you can read Stephen’s tip #2 found following the “Help” link in World-Machine’s main page (http://world-machine.com).
Tip #2 tells you how to export erosion information for using as masks in another program…
You can then play with other devices for other effects other than erosion related… You ca use a slope selector, to get the same kind of info from slopes… etc, etc…
From what I read, world machine can export heightfield (greyscale) data and some more custom masks. However, if I want to texture a terrain in a game engine, I use the grayscale heightfield for the actual mountain range - but how do I export the topological color texture (that looks so darn great) in world machine to a picture format (tif, tga, etc)?
Your help is appreciated.
Mike Felker
Well, technically speaking, you can’t do that in WM right now… I don’t know if that will be part of the “surprise feature set” 
to be staring in v1.0 , but it was mentioned some while back, short after v.99 came out…
But it maight be possible to do that somewhere else…
WM paints the heightmap indexing its height on a file “colors.tga”.
Normal greyscale (first color set) is on the first row of 256 pixels of that file. (the same for the other colors) What WM does for the “nice colours” is the same, there is a gradient in the file and WM simply copies the colour at that location and place it at that height for rendering only…
you said
world machine can export heightfield (greyscale) data and some more custom masks
That is not crystal true… world machine only exports greyscale data… This data can obviously be used as we please, so we can consider that a mask, but it is still greyscale data coming from the same place as what we would call a heightmap…
So back to how to create a nice looking texture, you shoule be able to open the heightmap in a paint program and replace the colours… (replace black with red, dark grey with green, light grey with pink, white with blue, etc)
I believe there is a way to do this in photoshop, but i am not sure… but it may involve changing the pallete… which is something I don’t know how to do…
Hope this clarified…
First of all i think this is a greate tool to use.
I have lot of fun in it, and its good to use for 3D games for example.
I only create some cool heightfield and then export my
heighfield terrain map into some painting program,
Actually its easy and fun, you can do a lot of things with it.
for example Photoshop (CS) it dosent have to be this program or version,
but its a program with lot of good and usefully functions.
I import this heightfield map into it,and then paint some awesome
texture on it.
Save it as a different diffuse color map.
And export both heightfield map (tga) and diffuse color map (tga) into my
3D applications, and the result often gets very nice.
Well thats my tip, i hope i could inspired you.