Hey folks!
I’m new on the forums but I’ve used WM for a while now.
I use it mostly for game dev. Not for scenery but for VFX. Noises, decals, VFX textures etc.
Been looking for a way to pinch my heightmaps towards the center. Much like photoshop pinch distortion.
Is there a feature like this that I’m just missing or a way to set it up?
As far as I know, there’s no “direct” way to do it.
The “Displacement” node is your main “warping” tool, but I have no idea how to direct that distortion towards a custom point on the terrain. There’s also “Distortion Generator”, that you can plug into the “transform” input of any generator device, does the same thing as as the displacement node.
Hey!
Thanks for your reply @WFab !
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten as well. I’ve been experimenting with generating craters through world machine and everything works well except the part where I want to add some sort of blast streaks that affect the terrain or coloring.
If I don’t find a solution I will just have to make those streaks in either photoshop or some other software.
It would however have been nice to contain it to just one software.
You can do additional 16 bit streaks in photoshop and apply over the WM file node and erode again, you can also sculpt the generated terrain and bring it back for more WM tweaks.
Sorry for the late response, only now had the time to work it out!
Yes this is possible, however, it’s effect is limited, or artefacts will arise.
And this is your node network (note, you do not need to change the settings of the Select Aspect device).
And the circle shape needs to be a a shape like this (so actually a Gaussian radial grad, but then in the Shapes device instead)
@HYLK Genius approach, as always!
Still not a perfect method, but works for a “flat shader” use cases. For 3D shape like a terrain, it’s going to pinch in 3 dimensions, towards the floor, and the effect is exponential for this shape. Attaching a screenshot.
Fix: Just reduce shape height to compensate for your terrain. The effect will be reduced as well, but gives you a good enough compromise.
Thanks! And fair point, I hadn’t properly checked it with 3D terrain, although this is expected behaviour, as it will pull all outward terrain into that point, so if the terrain around it is lower, it would become lower.
Maybe pinching is not something that useful in WM after all 
Some more testing, a bit more static and still has the issue, but a lot better.
Hey!
Thank you so much for the continous replies! I’m just about to test it out.
Here is the crater before any implementation of pinching effects:
Really interesting results now!
Here’s an update:
I get these really nice streaks out of the crater which would have been hard to get without either pinching or getting external data into the sim.
Thank you again @HYLK !
I made textures out of the heightmaps and imported it into unreal to make decals out of them.
They work quite well I think!
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