hmmm, when I do so, I get strange effects on my terrain…
If I set the constant to about 3000m and connect again with chooser mask, like in the image above - it is looking much better.
Ok, I´ll looking forward to the macros, you mentioned.
I am experiencing kind of trouble with texture-images.
When creating an island with a 100x100km extent, applied photo-textures look good-ok from like 50km away - but when zoom in, things getting ugly very quick.
When creating an island with a 10x10km extent, photo-textures are still good when zoomed closer - but the island itself… seems it can not be shaped very much.
Basically, it´s just “one big rock”, instead of a rocky-island, you know?!
Let´s take the “islnad” example, that ships with WM - you can get a nice shaped, interesting island.
But when try to texture it, results are not satisfying. everything get´s just too blurry…
When changeing the extent to 10 times smaller (from 100km to 10km) with keeping a 2K res, the textures looking good - but the island is just one big “blob”
Any ideas, how to overcome this?
Or is it just a “You can have one or the other - but not both” thing?
See, I´d like to have an interesting shaped Island (let´s say like a dragon´s head) AND have cripsy textures on it at the same time…
So maybe one have to take a side-route here? Like use a splatmap to assign some textures within another app and then put together
a nicediffuse-bitmap in there?!
If you are reducing the size of the world, you just need to reduce the feature size as well to compensate – so it taking a island from 100x100 to 10x10, if you want to get the same kinds of features scale the noise function feature size by 1/10 and also the layout break scale the same amount
Scaled everything in Island Shape and Perlin Mask to 1/10 - and scaled extent down to 10x10km (from 100x100km)
Scaled my Island-shape&perlinmask to fit into the 10x10km extent.
Now nearly everything is gone/there is just a little “sand-dune” left.
(I have set feature-size and transformation to 1/10 of the original value in the lowland/mountain noises)
If I would only manage to get this right, it would be really really awesome !!!
the full list of things to rescale to keep the exact same feel at 10x smaller scale would include:
world extents
world vertical extents
generator feature size
layout shape falloff scale
layout generator breakup amount and scale
Doing so should get you more or less the exact same island, for example.
But after saying all the above, I should also say that if your purpose in doing this rescaling is ONLY to get less blurry textures, I don’t think you will achieve what you want – for a given detail scale (shown in your world extents dialog, for example “13.5m per pixel”, you will get the same results no matter what size your world extents are. So if you reduce the world extents and build at the same size, you will indeed get more detail – but that’s because you’re covering less area. There’s no way to get a free lunch!
if you need higher resolution textures on a large area, you will need to do one or both of these things:
Build at a higher final resolution (make the detail scale finer)
Use higher-resolution input textures
Make the texture tile more frequently by increasing the world size of the texture.
by “world vertical extents” - do you mean “general setup - Quick adjust vertical scale” ?
I do not understand right, I guess. I want to re-scale the 100kmx100km extent to 10x10km, because I want textures to be not so blurry.
(that is my only reason to do it) When making the texture tile more frequently - it doest not really get better, even at the lowest stetting of about 500m.
(edit: sorry, my mistake. Only making the texture tile more frequently is not enough, like you stated - I also had to up the resolution, then it is getting better!)
When detail-slider is set to 2048x2048 for 100 by 100 km extent, I get a detail scale of 48.828m/pixel.
My textures are 2048x2048 and 1024x1024 resolution only.
So, when re-size this extent to 10 by 10 km and keep the 2048 resolution, I get a detail scale of 4.883m/pixel.
“100km_extent_zoom_far_out” looks great, but “100km_extent_zoom_in” doest not.
“10km_extent_zoom_far_out” look great, “10km_extent_zoom_in” still does “ok”
Basically, I want the cliff texture in “100km_extent_zoom_in” to look like “10km_extent_zoom_in” (please compare the attachments)
So- maybe I try set the detail-res to 8K and see, if that gives a better result.
edit2: Calculating an 100x100km extent with 8k res seems like a solution - texture is getting sharper now.
But I have to try some more…
If somebody knows how I could get the desired results (see images above) another way, I´d be happy if it is getting posted here…
I’m having a similar problem. When I tile a low res (1k) texture about 4 times, I should get better details in 4k builds. But it seems like blending option in tiling is causing the blurring problem in the whole texture. I’m using a 20km square terrain. will post the screenshot as soon as the build is done.
have made kind of progress - right now, I am testing a few things.
I reduced the extent from 100km to 50km and up the resolution from 2k to 4k. Now, I reduce the extent further down to 25km and res 4k, then I do a 8k test.
I want to check out, if 1/4 of the original extent (25 instead of 100km) and going from 2k to 4k detail-res would be better, than leaving extent at 100km and go up to 8k res, which takes significant more time…
Cheers!
edit: I think, I let it be for now - I´ll take the large-extent-with-8k-res-route, until a better solution comes up. I feel like I´am hitting a wall in WM-texturing right now. So I will test one last thing - texturing in another app with a splatmap serving as guide.
The build finished, but it seems like there is more work to be done within the engine itself if you want a decent looking texturing on your game terrain. For example in unity, I think marmoset skyshop is a good package to buy, because of it’s image based lighting tools and terrain shaders. The shading system can provide the desired small scale details. I wish we could do it in world machine, as I like the interface and freedom, but texture stretching is unavoidable, along with some other missing tools. Here’s my screen btw…
Yap, you´re right!
WM seems to be a bit limited for “AAA texture-tasks” on larger extents (>10km) - it does create terrains and that it does very very well.
For base texture, I will keep the 100km extent and go for 8k detail-res, then re-scale the texture to 4k for use in unity.
That way it will be kind of “ok” when not zoomed in too close.
So yeah, other tools come into play here, like skyshop for unity or maybe dedicated texturing apps (I´ll try one today).
You got the grass very well, really like that! (I did a mix of 2 grass textures btw)
It does strike me from this conversation that knowing the “output detail scale” (detail scale of the file input / localspace object once inserted into the terrain) is very useful and should be automatically reported, especially if you are trying to figure out how high-res you should be building your world at. Until then you can calculate this yourself. For example, using some of the numbers posted earlier:
If you have a photo texture input of 1k resolution, and you set the file input size slider to have the texture repeat every 5km, your texture detail scale is 5000m / 1024px = 4.9m/px. So if you are building a 20km x 20km zone, to capture the full detail of your texture you should be building at at least a 4096x4096 world (20km / 4096 = 4.8m/px)
If this is not reflecting the full quality of your input texture, can you post an example for me to take a look at?
So to capture the full detail of a 1024x1024 texure projected at 3km tiling onto a 100kmx100km world, I would have to set a
detail resolution of at least 32768 - correct?
(100/32768*1000 = 3.0m/px)
edit: But that would mean, one could lower the texture res to 256px to get a sharper projection?
When extent, detail-res and tiling are the same, a 256px texture should be choosen over a 2048px one?
Yup, your calculation is correct with regards to the size of terrain you’d need.
This is also why you noticed things being sharper in a smaller world : The resolution available in the build is stretched over much less area, and so is more detailed (for example, a 4k resolution world at 10x10km = 2.4m/px! This is reported in the World Extents dialog where you setup your world.)
Regarding your edit: In a way yes, but not usefully.
Here’s what I mean: if you used a 256x256 texture dropping into the same scenario as before, your texture scale would be 3km / 256 = 11m/px. To achieve “perfect” texture reproduction you would thus need at least a 9k world resolution (100km / 9000 = 11m/px).
But remember what “perfect” means : simply matching your texture. You reduced the resolution of your texture, and the target target resolution is now 11m/px instead of 3m/px – ~4x less detailed than if you used a 1024px texture. You could have achieved the same result by using the 1024px texture and just building at a smaller resolution! All other things equal, always use the highest res textures you can – it will never hurt and it can help.
Ok, my “best try” today was 1024 res @ 8K detail (100km extent) - was kind of “ok”. I also tried to reduce the extent to 50km (50%) and down to 10km (10%) and also re-sized “vertical scale”, “fall off” (sland-shape and perlin-shape), “size-value” of the two perlin noises acordingly…
The texture was super-sweet - but I could not manage to keep the terrain “feeling” from the 100km extent intact, unfortunatly… this would have been killer