External Terrain Builder

[JakBB]

I came up with the idea of an external free terrain builder software for World Machine terrains.
Basically you’d be able to share a terrain made in World Machine with a 3rd party which doesn’t own World Machine and this 3rd party would be able to build the terrain on his machine and adjust some “exposed” parameters. This would be really useful for people working on terrains as commissions for all kinds of customers, this would greatly reduce the file size of those commissions and give the customer a lot of control over the final result.

The Substance Suite has a free program like that called Substance Player, where you can load in substances made in Designer and build them on your machine, with endless seed variations.

This may reduce slightly the potential future userbase for WorldMachine, but I’m not sure, maybe it will also attract some new users who after having checked out a terrain in the free software realize how powerful World Machine is.

I also don’t know how this would integrate with the 2 price models for WorldMachine, since with the Indie version your build cores are restricted, I guess in the free software they’d also be restricted.

[HYLK]

Really like this idea!

[WFab]

I kinda dislike this idea in a very petty manner lol! I’m someone who creates and builds terrain for a commission. I personally would rather not share the terrain source.
But an entirely personal opinion, the above. As soon as a conceptual “exposed” parameters appear though, an independent builder tool is inevitable.

[blattacker]

In general, I kind of like this idea, if for no other reason than to see how different people treated the same “seed” terrain. Kind of like those challenges you see on YouTube or Facebook, where different artists draw the same scene in their style, or different photo editors are given the same photograph to edit.

@WFab On a professional level, what if it were a subscription-based service and the artists who created the “seed” terrains received payment proportional to the amount of downloads/uses their terrain received? Or if there were “premium” terrains that needed to be bought before they were used. Or a combination of the two? I could see that as another potential revenue stream for professionals like yourself, possibly even opening your services up to smaller projects who may not be able to afford your full services (I say without any idea of how much your services cost), while still maintaining a customer base that would want or require a fully customized terrain from you that may not be possible in this software?

[WFab]

Yeah professionally I could do tiered services to adapt to this change. I personally dislike tiered or subscription based service model, and it’s a headache to maintain, along with clients hating on it. But yeah, I could adapt regardless.