I’m verry i’m very impressed with World Machine. (Seriously) I just got it today, and I wasn’t able to find a clear answer about creating heightmaps in photoshop. I have the latest PS, and I know it supports 16bit images, but I wasn’t able to get my .raw files to save correctly.
I have used the File Imput to import 8bit images, but can clearly see all 256-steps in the terrain.
Is there a easy method for creating heightmaps in photoshop that are 16bit? So that I can import drawn maps into World Machine without the 256 ‘steps’?
I don’t know if it is related, but WM will look at the file extension, and if it sees “raw” it will think its an 8bit terrain… So you need to save the file with the correct r16 extension. Otherwise WM might not behave well…
I don’t have the latest PS, so I don’t know how to save 16bit files. Still it shouldn’t be much different from making sure image mode is 16 bit greyscale, and saving it as raw (renaming to r16). Or so I think…
I still seem to be having the problem with the banding. I’m still not sure if I’m properly exporting the 16bit files. I tried changing the extension to .r16, and the file opened, but it still has banding.
Are there any devices that can smooth the banding? I guess that is another route I could go. I’d really love if someone could post some sort of step by step process of how they can create a greyscale heightmap in photoshop and bring it into WM without any banding. Whether that is through proper file formats, or some sort of smoothing technique in WM.
I am evaluating this software for an upcoming game project. My studio wishes to find some really solid errosion tools, and most of our designers like to paint (rough-out) their landscapes in photoshop as it gives them greater control of our environments. WM is really great because we can see real time previews and add a lot of realism to the terrain mesh.
However, it is not totally adapted to our pipeline and I’m just hoping to find some way to streamline WM or another tool like it into our process.
WM has the best errosion tools and the fact that you can see a dynamic preview really makes the system pretty cool.
Thanks very much to anyone who can help me out in this research
a number of studios use WM with a similar workflow; if Photoshop is set to 16bit Greyscale mode, you should be able to create a mask and save it as a raw, rename it to .r16, and have the map import correctly. You will know that you’ve saved as a 16bit RAW file if your terrain shape appears correctly in WM when following the above process.
If you have any banding at this point, I can’t imagine what it would be other than a painting tool artifact from photoshop. What version of PS are you using?
In any case, attaching a Blur device set to Gaussian blur, with a relatively small radius, will smooth out any banding and give you smooth masks. It shouldn’t be necessary, but if all else fails it will certainly do the job.
I will test out the blur device tomorrow at work. I just have the free edition at home. I’m guessing that’ll work nicely. I was able to get rid of most of the banding exporting as .raw and changing the file extension to .r16. Now all that remains is just a minor noise/bumpiness over the surface of the heightmap. I’m thinking the blur will remove this easily, and I imagine its just from the tools in photoshop.
Are you able to list any of the other studios using your software?
As we add tools to our editor (terrain editing), I would really love to include an erosion brush. So within the editor we could “paint erosion” over the terrain. I would imagine we could paint in the lower-resolution preview mode that you have successfully implemented, and then render the higher resolution mesh as we choose. I am under the impression that your erosion tool needs to look at larger portion of the terrain to create the realistic erosion WM creates. I suppose we could possibly “soft-select” parts of the terrain for processing. I am an environment artist in charge of researching tools and methods to improve our pipeline. So I have some grand ideas, but I’m not sure from the technical side what is possible. We have a streamlined editing system and I would like to keep most of our pipeline located within as few programs as possible.
This tool seems to have many features we would love to implement into our production pipeline. Would you mind if I had one of our graphics programmers contact you?
Yes, make sure any work the artists are doing in PS is in 16 bit mode the entire time, not just a conversion to 16 bit before export/save. I’m not actually sure PS’s brushes even work in 16 bit mode themselves or if they just operate in 8 bit even when in 16 bit mode, but hopefully by now with CS2 they have made that work properly.
For the actual export and import process, since you are having trouble with a direct import to WM, I suggest saving as a 16bit tiff then using Terraconv to convert to .ter and import as .ter in WM.
As Oshyan says, it sounds strongly like the masks are being created in Photoshop in 8bit painting mode. (The “noise/bumpiness” is another artifact of that.). Up until recently you couldn’t paint in 16bit mode in Photoshop.
I don’t think I can list studios using WM without their permission, although having that – a sort of “Praise for World Machine” with brief blurbs about who’s using it and why is something I’d like to have.
