I just discovered World Machine, and it looks absolutely great… Just need some time to deal with the beast, but I already managed to create some stuff.
I have a map drawed onto the paper with Photoshop, and I would like to create it’s geometry in World Machine, or at least to have parcels of it.
I would like to know if it is possible to draw a map for the “contour” and then use the world editor to get something that looks like my first job on the paper.
Currently, the only way to get something inside WM is through the File input device. And that means the you can only start from an initial heightmap. So this forces you to do some more “photoshoping”, in order to convert the drawn map into something like a heightmap. That means you should paint a greyscale image to input into WM, so you can afterwards edit that in WM.
How did you draw the map? Is it using all those lines you see in real cartographic maps? If so, you can paint each closed shape with a sligtly lighter colour to get a rough heightmap. I find it very tricky to draw a map seenfrom above using these cartographic lines (I don’t know their real name by the way). I tried doing that, but found that the terrain gets too steep inplaces and not so steep in other areas… it is difficult to come up with something decent…
You can play with some WM devices to make something out of a simple heighmap… If you don’t want to draw the map with the level of detail I mentioned above, you can start with a white image that has black curved line running through it, like a river, blurr it a couple of times in photoshop, and play with WM devices to improve the looks of that… Devices you may find usefull for that are:
-perlin noise
-combiner
-chooser
-splitter
-all types of selectors
-expander
-displacement
-erosion
carefull when using erosion, don’t get too excited and avoid using lots of them… because of memory issues… I know it’s hard to avoid this, but try, never the less… Oh, and save often!..
Great! Come back later when you’ve finished, with your thoughts or problems!
It will look dull to treat a nice-looking map like a black & white drawing, but you can keep layers invisible in the photoshop original to remind you of where the roads where supposed to be
Hi, your post gave me a few ideas, I have a need for the same basic process so I this afternoon I generated a macro to help. If you are intrested check the macro shareing section I posted it there. Mask Bound Plus
The macro takes a ruff black in white masks as “File Input” it then limits the foregound input to the masked area, there are several options for controling the fall off at the edges. But you will need the registered version and plug-in pack #1 installed.
James Stuart Johnson
J. Stuart J. Production Art & Imaging
