Hello, I’m looking for a tutorial/ help or macro that creates mountains. There was a post on the forum but I can’t seem to find it,
Thanks,
//EDIT: I found the post that I was looking for here:
http://world-machine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=131&highlight=mountain
but any other tips/ mcros etc regarding mountins would be very helpful 
monks
Well, a big first question would be exactly what kind of “mountains” you’re trying to create and on what scale. Do you want a “chain” of mountains, a general mountaneous area (as shown in the thread you linked), or a “hero” mountain (like Rainier for example)? The techniques for each may be interrelated but somewhat different.
For example in doing a mountain chain I’d wait until WM Pro because it’s really going to make these things a lot easier. 
But you could use either a hand-painted mask or one derived from a built-in generator to create the shape you wanted, then use that to mask your mountain shape generator (displaced or combined voronoi works well).
In WM a lot of what will make a “mountain” or chain of mountains look good comes down to erosion. With WM 1.x’s powerful new “Geological time enhancement”, you can easily remove all traces of recognition from a source terrain. This can be very useful if all you want is to define a basic shape and then have some realistic mountain-type stuff come out of it. This is the way to a “hero” mountain.
Easiest thing to do is create a radial gradient, combine it with a perlin, and then throw on an erosion with Geological time enhancement and play with the settings until you get something you like. One good approach is to focus on the large-scale features first. Use channeled erosion with a high base duration and medium erosive power on the geological enhancement. Vary the Channel Depth to taste - higher will make very rough-looking mountains, not necessarily highly realistic, medium-low seems most realistic to me. Then use a medium-low sediment carry and rock hardness (adjust to taste), and either a simple or inverse filter on low-ish strength (again adjust to taste). That ought to give you a starting point. The more heavy the noise in your original blend with the radial grad, the more interesting your mountain shape will be. Then you could add some standard erosion on top to add some non-channel details and smooth some things out.
Give it a shot.
Thanks Oshyan- I think I was really looking for an erosion tut for mountains- and the last paragraph is a good start I remember seeing the mountains in the link and being impressed.
monks
You’re welcome. Don’t forget to show us your results.
My personal favorite is to keep it simple with Voronoi and Perlin generators combined, then filtered with regular erosion.
Here is the World Mahcine file so you can experiment on your own:
!Dial Up Users Beware!
http://www.stthereserothschild.org/mattPortfolio/grdms/sample.zip
A couple of notes:
The purpose of these mountains isn’t to be very realistic, but I think they look ok considering how quickly they can be made.
You may need World Machine Standard to use the Voronoi generator.
They are kinda pyramid like, but could be smoothed out with more erosion.
Another sample using slightly different settings:
*Updated link to file, changed from .tmd to .zip. Sorry about that : )
That’s nice presentation, showing the node map and the output together.
Incidentally your link to the file goes no where. 
Says page cannot be found.
Thanks mattg.
Could you tell me the settings you used for the second shot with a simple breakdown of how you created the seperate elements: sediment carry, etc? Oh my, that is extremely nice terrain! Was that a 1024 file?
RedSquare- the link is a zip: right click.
monks
Well, I didn’t save that file, and of course as I closed it I realized I should have. Thus, I cannot upload the file for you to have a good look at.
No matter, let me try’n’break it down a bit from what I can remember: In the last post I made a remark about the pyramid like structure of the first shot, the second example was my answer to this problem. Let’s look at the changes per node:
Erosion: I reduced the Channel Depth setting in the ‘Channeling Erosion Parameters’ area. This reduced the depth of the erosion, making it more even. Next I increased ‘Erosive Power’ to round off the peaks and smooth out the valleys. This is not the best solution because now we have area’s on the slopes that look like glaciers, however, we could fix this in our 3D program or game engine with texturing and what not. Either way, we now have less pyramid like shapes in our terrain.
Perlin Noise: I made the ‘Feature Sizes’ smaller to impart more detail. This offset some of the loss in detail increasing ‘Erosive Power’ imparted.
Voronoi: Changing the ‘Scale’ attribute from large to small has the effect of creating fewer or more peaks, respectively. The first pic has too many peaks, so I just increased the scale (moved the slider to the right). Now I have fewer peaks.
I then increased the ‘Terrain Height Scale’, the slider located below the real time preview window on the left hand side of the main screen. This made up for the loss in height variation imposed after I decreased the number of peaks as described above.
Tweaking the Combiner’s ‘Strength’ attribute is a good way to strike a balance between the mountain shapes generated by the Veronoi generator, and the random noise of the perlin generator.
Yes, the screen shots are 1024’s. 512’s do not look nearly as nice.
One last thought: I had a simple goal in mind, make mountains less pyramid like, but that was about it. I just play around while keeping some
basic rules in mind and see what happens.
Very nice tip, that one!
Cheers.
Yes, I was having a bit of trouble with noise scale and decided to use the Combiner- which led to the discovery that the Combiner Strength was really making the difference there.
I like the small scale noise in the shot: makes for a convincing surface.
monks
monkschain
RedSquare- the link is a zip: right click.Cheers, when I tried it was before he altered the link.