As the topic suggests, what is the best way to deal with large areas of terrain such as those in Oblivion, that end up being split into 1024x1024 areas (where 1 pixel = 1m) that maintain continuity between sections, etc. Would you do the whole thing in 1 project and somehow split and output out those sections or what?
What I want to do is load in a 10km x 10km island greyscale heightmap thats relatively low res, and work on that under the assumption that 1m=1pixel in world machine, then spit out this entire island in 1024x1024 maps.
I do something similar, but at a smaller scale… I tend to use Photoshop’s hability to slice images… I do the huge thing in WM (usually less than 4Kx4K) and then slice things to 256x256 or so, in photoshop, using the slice tools and automaticly saving the various cropped images… But as you see, that is for small things…
A 10Kmx10Km terrain, would be ~10Kx10K at 1m/pixel. And WM 1.25 currently “only” allows you to go 8Kx8K in a single image; and you need a lot of memory!
I would probably advise you to do this at a lower scale: something like deviding your island into no more than 9 areas of 4Kx4K, and slipiting them afterwards into 1024x1024…
But you do need some work in defining names for the output files and all that.
I’m not a great expert on large-scale WM-use, so other suggestions could may be more appealing…
There is some interesting discussion on this topic going on over at the Middle Earth DEM Project: http://me-dem.ashundar.com/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,26/func,view/id,719/catid,4/
http://me-dem.ashundar.com/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,26/func,view/id,744/catid,8/
http://me-dem.ashundar.com/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,26/func,view/id,824/catid,8/
Ultimately it is a problem we’re all struggling with but the hope is that we can really figure out exactly what we need from these programs and then that such features will be implemented. Workarounds using current versions of applications are also being figured out.
- Oshyan
This area is one that WM Pro has been specifically designed to address: not just the creation, but the manipulation of huge world data (many times more information than could be kept in memory in a single build).
I can’t say too much more yet as Pro is still a ways out, but just a heads up.
As far as workarounds in the meantime, it really depends on how you want to work on the terrain.
The world defined in World Machine exists infinitely in space (well, close enough anyways). So if you create a world in WM, you can export square tiles of it by simply exporting the area from, say, 0…7.68km, then moving the render quad over by 7.68km and exporting the area from 7.68km…15.36km next, etc. Laborious, but you can create some quite large worlds this way, the downside being you will have to tile and merge them by hand.
You can easily load a low-res guide bitmap using the File Input tool, and positioning the resulting shape in world space by using the Transform positioning control and the scale slider.
So in a way, WM itself is resolution-independent. The output and calculation times depend on the resolution you set, but internally it treats 1km as 1km.
The 10km island thing was an example - the reason I want to do this is I’ve been working on a game mod for a while. We have a world map and locations where playable maps themselves are on the world map, and it would be great if I could load in that world map, then load in another heightmap for the map im working on (anywhere from 1km x 1km to 8km x 8km), position it on the world map, and work on that section, knowing that any time we want to extend this or make another map on the next section over I can just open that and not worry about wether its consistant or not. As a base the world map would have masks for different types of terrain, and within the areas of those masks I’d just have procedurally generated stuff until I wanted to work on a specific area.
yep, that’s it exactly. You will export the same terrain area whether you create a 256x256 or a 8192x8192 terrain – its just the detail level that is being changed.
For what you want to do, you would create a File Input device, load your guide mask, and set the Scale slider to, lets say all the way to the right (122km). If you go into Explorer, you will see that guide shape existing on a huuge scale in your world. You can then set the render quad to any smaller location within that world, and render the resulting terrain map for that location.
You can load other masks from Files on different scales and place them wherever you wish in the world, so that you can customize specific areas with special features. Likewise, you can control highly-detailed procedural terrain with the masks, etc.
Well I’ve finally gotten around to putting this into practice and it’s beautiful, up until I have to screw around with sizes and co-ords of the map. Remnant, would it be possible to throw the world size stuff (offset X,Y, size in km, output pixels) into a node that would overwrite the general setting, and explorer view would correspond with that node if it or any nodes coming from it are selected? Hell I’ll shoot you $50 if that makes it any more do-able