Tiling Noises Please! [images, scene included]

Development and Feature Requests
#1

There are more and more programs popping up which utilize procedural noise functions to enhance the look of bitmaps when creating textures for games. DDO and Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer are two examples.

World Machine can do alot of what these programs already do but when using any of the included noise functions, the lack of tiling noise breaks the textures and renders them almost useless. It’s a shame because World Machine can be used for far more than terrains.

This layered rock material It was 100% created in World Machine. Unfortunately, it can’t be used as-is because the edges won’t tile. Using the seamless tiling macro that was created long ago does not produce clean results.

Please remnant, consider added tiling to the noise functions in your excellent program. You know many professional studios use it and they’ll love you more for it.

#2

Hi there,

That’s a beautiful rock texture – I’m quite impressed! Actually, If you are willing I’d love to hear more about your technique here.

Funny enough, just a bit ago I was pondering adding additional noise basis functions the other day – including periodic support. This is something that is definitely on my agenda – its currently a tossup between additional modeling devices and better/more robust large-world support for the next expansion of functionality. More detail on all of that “real soon now”… but again, I like this suggestion and it is definitely under strong consideration.

#3

Thanks for the complements, Remnant.

Yes, the output of World Machine has a great many uses for next-generation game development. Among all other procedural noise generators, World Machine is the fastest and easiest so naturally I prefer to use it. Since nothing tiles, I can only use the heightmap output as alphas for programs like Mudbox and ZBrush. Then the diffuse output from WM is tossed away as it all becomes a different model. I can, however, bring the new heightmap into WM and texture there there too, but I’ve already lost the interesting flow map from the original, probably some resolution… Ultimately the whole process makes iteration impossible. Tiling noises would cut immense time off development and allow me to create limitless variations of tiling (and non-tiling) textures.

I attached a documented version of the node file for the ridges. The file was made in version 2.3 RC2 64bit. There are a few custom macros in there but they’re not all that complex.

I also have a number of terrains I created if you check out http://www.quantumtheoryentertainment.com. There are in-browser 3d demos of each terrain type that are lit with normal and diffuse maps. Take a look.

#4

Nice works you have there, QuantumTheory. 8)

Thanks for sharing the scene.

#5

Yes this is nice to make 2Dtextures with WM

What about this 2D textures, can they also be made in WM?
Diff-, Spec-, Normalmap…That would be so awesome

Sand
Dunes
Grass
Mud
Lava
Snow
Concrete

#6

There are a lot of new devices and framework improvements that could be made to make texture-creation work in WM both easier and more powerful. I’ll have several announcements over the next week or so about future development directions – a lot of the decisions here are going to be driven heavily by everyone in the WM community chiming in and really shaping where we go from here!

#7

Maybe using a poll with some of the feature requests and the things you think might be possible in the next step might help. Its hard to choose but I would definitively go for bigger worlds, SSD(HDD) devices caching, mostly performance wise improvements. Ans workflow too. But I also wouldnt mind some nice erosion algorithms.
Anyway. thanks for the final 2.3 release It`s a nice update. I also enjoyed the new examples. It also helps to see how some of the devices are working.

#8

Bigger worlds & performance for me, also one thing that could help bigger would be a feature like “close this file and run this file when done”, allowing to create a chain of files so that it can automatically restart WM clean up all memory use and do something as input with the output of previous project.

#9

When you mention bigger worlds, do you mean that tiling will work better? Currently the tiling in world machine is subpar because it breaks with a few nodes, and has to resort to blending ( which is no good for the most part ) trying to achieve seamless tiles is hard business.

#10

This would be awesome for textures creation

#11

Remnant:

Any news on this front?

Much appreciated!

#12

repeating noise functions lost out for the first round of feature improvements that I just released, but its still on the block for the next go. Technically its a pretty easy improvement…

#13

Eagerly awaiting this! Thanks Remnant!

#14

Any news on the tiling front?

#15

The first dev release for 3.0 almost gained a generic repeating texture device that would automatically blend the edges of your terrain/edges. It was pulled because, frankly, it just wasn’t quite good enough yet.

Making the generators themselves repeat is quite useful for localspace textures; the only issue is that that also forces the feature size to be a multiple of the output size

#16

Anything along those lines would be cool to see! I’m not sure how big of an issue forcing the feature size would be…

#17