techniqes for coloring?

Bug Reports
#1

Hi, I finally just picked up WM2Pro. I have used it at work at my day job, and I love it. So now that I have it at home and am beginning to dig into features I hadn’t played with before, I’m looking for more information on coloring the terrain. Everything I’ve found in my own searches hasn’t covered anything more than using or editing the default altitude gradients. What I’d like to do is output an RGBA Bitmap with actual features of the terrain, crevasses, erosion, and so on, but I don’t know where to begin looking.

Can anyone point me to some good tutorials, lively communities, or some users who share their techniques to get good looking, ‘natural’ terrain color? I just need somewhere to get started.

Many thanks in advance!

#2

Hi there,

This is a good question, and perhaps someone else can chime in with some resources. Much of the best work I’ve seen done has been in private commercial projects unfortunately.

The “Basic Coverage” macro was meant to be only a simple example of custom texturing, however it has ended up getting heavy use! But you can do much more sophisticated things than just that.

The best advice I have is to open some of the examples in your “World Machine Documents\Examples\RGB Examples” folder to see how to construct texturing networks. Although somewhat intimidating at first glance, they are no different than any other WM networks, and can be amazingly powerful.

Two good choices to examine:

In the “RGB Basic Texturing Example” world, you can see how height and slope selectors are used to create four different material maps, which are then combined together to form the terrain. (This is very similar to the Basic Coverage macro)

“Dusty and Dry” shows how to use those two basic selectors to create much more complicated combinations which are then used to create the material maps.

“Acid World Flow” does something simple and tricky but powerful. It essentially uses one of the built-in height-color maps from WM, but instead of simply feeding it the heightmap, it combines in some of the erosion output information to create a colormap that has been displaced by the amount of erosion done, resulting in a quite interesting looking texture done very simply.

#3