Map to 3D -- Need tips from experienced pro's

Geology and Terrain
#1

So I have a 2D map of a fictional continent I’m looking to create in 3d with the aid of World Machine. The map gives me the coastlines of the islands and general topographical features such as mountain ranges and water bodies. My ultimate goal is to export this as a height field image and import it into Crysis, Unity or UDK for population and exploration. I also hope to utilize the splat masks that WM produces for use in the engine.

I’ve seen several tutorials on how to get generated terrain into these engines, but what I need help with is how to properly utilize the layout generator to maintain coastlines and geological features.

Some questions I have are:

  1. Does size matter? Should I be working in real-world scale? Or should I work at a larger scale to provide enough room for erosion to have space to work it’s magic for interesting geological elements? Should the dimensions I work with in WM be 1:1 to what I expect the height field to be in the game engine?

  2. Depth seems to be a big challenge. If I establish an ocean height, and set my initial land mass say 50 meters above water level I find that any fractal noise and erosion dips the island below water level. Likewise if I set the initial height too high, I get a very sheer drop off since I can’t spread out the falloff of the layout shape too wide or it begins to blend with adjacent shapes. Island chains are particularly difficult given that.

  3. Should I try and maintain the coastline? Or should I work with establishing good topology first, then mask out the coastline shape via the layout generator + mask with a blur to make it a soft falloff?

I’m sure there’s 100 ways to approach this but some of the ideas I’ve tried have given me mixed results but nothing as easy to work with as just working big. I just don’t know if plugging in large values to get good features is a viable method if I intend to have a 40m[sup]2[/sup] height field in the engine. (The engines support world tiles.)

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks guys!

#2

Lots of questions, so I’ll see if I can help with any of them.

  1. In terms of algorithms and effects WM doesn’t care if your terrain is 1m by 1m or 100km by 100km. However, choosing a natural scale can make working in the devices and viewports easier as they were designed for relatively “normal” scales. Without a strong reason to do otherwise I would attempt to make your world close to your actual scale.

  2. What you might find useful here is to create your islands flat against a zero elevation ground, then “cut them out” using the shape mask and raise them up from the seabed. This gives you total control over how much lift they have, and you can customize and blend as you see fit the shelf zone.

  3. This is a bit related to #2, but I find the answer is… both. Bleeding in some knowledge of your coastline can really help grant you realistic landforms… then after everything is processed mask out the shapes to make sure that you’re enforcing any contraints you need to satisfy.

I actually just worked up an example world demonstrating this but did so on the latest non-public build that has some file format changes – so the world file is not loadable by previous editions. oops! But here’s a picture of the device world and the resulting output:

#3

Can you post that project please?

edit: durrrr, just read the little sentance blurb at the end saying it won’t load in the current version. hehe, ignore me then.

#4

Thank you so much for the reply Remnant, I’ve been toying with the free version at home since we picked up the site license at the office. It’s exciting to hear an update is in the works.

In your example you have 2 layout generators, one for the general “ground plane” if you will, and another for the mountains. I assume they’re combined with Addition? Then eroded, what is the function of the Continent Raise (Clamp) and the mask input from the coastline layout generator? If it was to raise the terrain up because erosion had dipped it below water level, what is the benefit of inserting the mask from the coastline layout generator?

Once again thank you for your help, asking these novice questions really do help me understand the thinking of more seasoned users.

Vathrik

#5

Tacocombo:

As I mentioned, I actually created that world in the latest unreleased WM 2.3 Beta-3 – it can’t be opened until that is released unfortunately.

Vathrik:

Yup, the combiner is set to a simple addition. The addition of the Continent Raise is to make the minimum height level anywhere on the continent be raised above sea level. Without this, the lowest points would be considered underwater. The mask from the coastline generator controls the areas that are raised – without it you are simply raising everything, including the seabed, which doesn’t really help much.

Cheers!

#6

Awesome! Thanks for the breakdown!

#7

Someone asked the same question here. Hope it helps!

monks

#8

Hi there,

You’re right, the continent raise layout is doing two things:

  1. the masked Clamp at the end of land generation is set to bring up the land heights (and only the land heights, not the ocean) so that the land is above sea level.

  2. The Coastline layout is also piped to the mask of the rolling hills generator (or whatever other land generators you have) to mask out the land areas and make sure that the same height patterns don’t appear in the ocean basins. Why isn’t it also connected to the mountain perlin? Because that one is already masked by its own layout generator specifying where to put the mountains.

Also, note that you could achieve much the same thing by instead wiring a new Combiner between the existing one and the Erosion device that is set to Multiply and has the continents layout piped to it. This would mask all terrain before erosion instead of just a single noise generator – if you had more complex patterns this would be the way to do it.

Oh, and since we’re on beta-3 now I can now post the file for this one. It is attached! You have to be using WM 2.3 Beta 3 for this world file to load.

Edit: Updated world file so it loads properly in 32 and 64bit versions.

#9

I was really interested to look at this sample and learn from it, but it’s crashing my world machine when I opened it. I just upgraded to WM Beta 2.3 V3. When I first open the project it says not everything could be displayed, and I might be missing some required plugins for the project. It shows me all of the nodes, but they are not connected properly. Shortly after, the app crashes – any ideas?

#10

Hi there,

I’ve confirmed this issue! There appears to be a slight bug in the I/O path between 32bit and 64bit editions of WM at the moment. I am putting this on the fast-track fix list.

In the meantime, if you are using a 64bit OS use World Machine 64bit to open the file.

#11

further update: I’ve attached a fixed version of the world that should load correctly in 32bit World Machine.

#12

Wow, Remnant, thats a great coastline there, i love WM you really should be congratulated on developing such a great piece of software on your own mate.

#13

I really like how the mountains came out, they look great. I am still learning World Machine, so how do I make the mask so I only get mountains in certain area’s? I haven’t figured that out yet so I can use the macro from above.

Thanks

#14

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