maybe it´s possible to add some curvature to a terrain, so that very large extents can be curved a bit, just like real earth?
A parameter like “add curvature scale dependent or scale - independent” would be awesome.
And of course some artistic setting for a “little-big-planet” kind of terrain for creating a round planet would be also nice!
The curvature would mean the terrain is bent as per the earth’s surface, which in turn would mean that features would be distorted accordingly. But since bent features would mean defying the gravity vector or simply “normals”, it would not be possible using the present architecture of wm, since it works on heightfield data.
But you have to build the world flat, export heightmap and masks, bend the plane in max or maya, apply displacement on it (taking computed normals into account. But that would still mean stephen cannot add that feature to world machine. (Yet?)
Since it works with heightfield data and can produce a height/displacement map - where every pixel gets a value - why not add
a calculation to modify the values of a map? Like in first pass, calculation as always. Then (if “add curvature” is selected) go on and do this steps:
Get size of extent
Calculate, how much distorted this extent would get, when projecting it to an “earth-like” sphere (1,96 m for 5000 m, taking this formular y = L² / (2 * 6371000)
Change the “height-value” for every pixel/point by interpolation for every point on extent (assuming center of extent is “Zero” distortion)