Re-scaling a scene

Bug Reports
#1

One of the WM 2.3 example scenes is called Talus Fields. It’s a nice scene but the scale is around 12 km sq.

What is the easiest way to scale this down to 5 km sq. without losing the look of it?

#2

Hi there,

Just to clarify, what you’re looking for is to reproduce the same scene but on a smaller scale? Or do you just want a smaller “piece” of the world?

The first question is, do you need to? Fully artificial scenes don’t necessarily have any pinning to reality; You can probably just take the scene as-is, and upon import into the application you’re using just set the scale smaller. Make sure you scale the altitude by the same amount. So for example, import into a 5km x 5km x 1.1km (2625m x 5km / 12km) box.

If you want the same scale but just a smaller area, all you need to do is reduce the world extents in the project settings or the layout view to select only a 5km box instead of a 12km one.

#3

I wanted to create a 5 x 5 km terrain in Unity.

I thought that by changing the scale from 12 km to 5 km would give me a more detailed heightmap.

So your saying it doesn’t matter?

#4

You’re correct that within Unity, a 12km region is going to have lower apparent detail (pixels per kilometer) than a 5km region for the same number of heightfield pixels.

If you want to produce a more detailed heightmap, use the second option I mentioned (select a 5km x 5km region of the world instead of a 12km x 12km one)… or increase the resolution of the heightfield.

#5

That brings me back to my issue. What is the easiest way to make the features on the terrain smaller (so that when I do scale down the region to 5 x 5 km I will get lots of detail)?

#6

I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear – if you are trying to reproduce the same scene exactly, just smaller, then don’t change anything within World Machine – as I mentioned earlier just import into a smaller scale within Unity. The heightfield itself does not typically carry any world dimensions, and if you adjusted everything perfectly inside of WM to create your world at the smaller scale, you would end up with the exact same heightfield anyways! When all is said and done.

To make the same scene smaller inside of World Machine would require determining the scale factor (5/12 or ~.41) and then reducing all elevations and feature scales by that. However, some devices are not completely scale independent, so you may encounter differences in the look of the world – this is true of the thermal erosion in that example. A quick attempt to do this shows some differences in the world features present.

To recap, the options are:

  1. Export the exact same terrain, just smaller: See above
  2. Export a smaller area of the terrain
  3. Modify the world and export a smaller terrain – this may be hard to get right.
1 Like
#7

Thanks for the info.

#8