I may be wrong, but while teaching people WorldMachine i find the most un-clear part of worldmachine in lack of examples that demonstrate multy biomes and multy object worlds (because usually create single-biome world or island is not enough)
A lot of people while learning WM wants to understand how to create maps that contains of a couple of biomes, for example stereotipic: cold/normal/hot biome gradient map, with some hand-placed objects like: snow mountain/grass plain/lava volcano accordinally
Why thats important?
Usually multy-biome maps uses some masking technicks, that are important to understand for new users. I may pray that currently each advanced user of WM have developed own unique comfortable way to select biomes, and objects masks. (At least this situation i spectate while discussions in WM Community discords) No one did have example to learn how to do it “properly”, from WM box, lol. It significantly prolongate learning curve, so think thats important point
I agree, an official example tutorial for a multi biome/climate tutorial project (or a set of projects) could potentially cover a lot of topics that are hard to learn for newbies. For example proper usage of River and Water tools, using those to drive erosion effects properly, masking, etc.
In any case World Machine 40 series is a lot different than those old tutorials available, so imo it needs a full refresh on those examples and macros included with world machine. Maybe we can create a new post collecting ideas for packaged content included with world machine?
In the meantime, we had some extra content hosted in the files section of our FB group about World Machine. If you’re on facebook, you’re welcome to join the World Machine Software group, though it’s now as silent as these forums. Once you join, check the featured posts, there’s a document I created collecting some stuff from the community.
EDIT: Scratch that featured doc on FB, the google drive content (Example files) by Adam has been deleted apparently. Now there’s just @HYLK 's LTE tutorials linked in there. Not much useful now for anyone besides very new users of WM.
What kind of examples of multi-biome blending are you looking for?
A biome is essentially the climate of a region. In the context of World Machine we’ll include the influence over the terrain forms, not just the texturing, etc.
You’re right that every artist probably has their own workflow for doing this, and that it would be helpful to have some guidelines around it.
The fundamental questions to me are:
Scale. Biomes can be small or large, but they tend towards large. Modelling continents and entire worlds has a whole different set of challenges than regions.
Are you trying to blend together different terrain shape primitives, or are you concerned with texturing (both is of course an answer )
Art Direction / Realism - are we trying to make something that looks like nature, or more stylized?
The answers to each question basically will push your workflow in one direction or another.
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