Terrain wierdly layered?

Bug Reports
#1

Hello there!
I have just been starting ouz with world machine, it is told to be an amazing program,
and the gallery shots really convinced me.
So, i made a mesh of a landscape in Autodesk Mudbox, exported a heightmap and used it as file input.
But as soon as I build the terrain, it gets tiled, kind of like these Rice Plantages on mountains in Asia… If you know what I mean.
To clarify, I attached a picture of a render at 2048x2048, the original resolution of my heightmap.

Thanks for help and replies in advance!

#2

Hi there,

That kind of tight terracing is a classic problem – and almost always means you are exporting your heightmap from mudbox as a 8 bit image. 8 bit/channel images have only 256 steps between highest and lowest elevations, so you will almost always get those staircase/terrace effects.

Try re-exporting from mudbox as a 16bit image (16bit TIFF, PNG, RAW…) and they should go away.

If you don’t have that option, the only other choice is to blur out the terraces by putting a Blur device after your file input and setting it to a radius high enough to destroy the terraces. This is a common practice when importing coarse-resolution DEMs and other limited data sources.

Cheers!

#3

Hey there!
I realized this yesterday, when i was looking at the size of my heightmap, but thanks for your answer, hopefully other people with that problem find this thread!
I played around with WM and… Wow. With a bit of tweaking and some Nodes the terrain looks so awesome!
But i realized that there are only very few macros to download, why is that? I would guess everyone make them themselves, or is there some other site with loads of these? :smiley:

#4