When I saw the “Blend” Option for tiled builds I was scared that each tile would have nothing to do with its neighbor but I then read a few things to the contrary and thought things were okay. …but I’m often getting fairly obvious seams like the one I’ve attached and I thought I’d ask if there is a way to overcome this.
I suppose the answer is more blending. This seems to end up looking okay for height maps (Not sure about channeling or plateaus) but it is a shame that the Splat Map Converter’s Exclusion is not respected / broken by blending. Not sure how much effort it would be but setting up different amounts of blending per device somehow (100% for height maps but only 12% for splat maps) might mitigate this a bit.
Also, just checking: Is per output-device resolution still on the roadmap? e.g., I need power of two plus 1 for height maps, power of two for everything else, and some half resolution maps per tiled-build.
I ran into this in a bit way while using WM for a feature film project.
My only true solution was to dumb down my WM script a little bit, “precomp” at several steps, and shoot it out as a single 32K image to get the fidelity I needed. I tried multiple blending settings, none of which really provided me with anything near seamless…and this was without Geological time erosion, just a simple one.
There may be better ways to just blend with Nuke or Houdini after the fact, but I haven’t explored any of that yet.
Sometimes there is very little to do but use higher blending, but if you are seeing dramatic height differences across tiles 95% of the time it stems from using one of the “forbidden” devices (they will be marked with a red (!) in the device view. The usual suspects are:
- Clamp device with normalize checked (uncheck and use “Find Extents” instead)
- The classic perlin noise device with stablized noise unchecked (check and clamp instead)
- Equalizer device without a captured sample (capture a sample)
- Flipper
Other devices can also occasionally cause problems (such as a very large blur radius or extensive geological time enhancement) but the above are the ones to check first. If none of them apply, then you have two choices:
- Increase the tile blending amount. 100% blending should eliminate any “blocking”, but will of course take longer to render.
- Separate your world file into two stages: a first stage that has whatever devices are causing the issue within. This world will render a single file for the entire area at a reduced resolution from your final tiled build. You then create a second file that loads the results from the first, and applies the rest of / final detailing before exporting into tiles. This allows you to use much less blending. Helping this workflow out, you can also use the new Library Output device from the dev build (see below) to store all of the intermediate packets to a single library file to be loaded by the second world.
Finally, regarding per-device resolution; this is actually already available! You must download the Dev Branch builds to access this feature however. Check out http://update.world-machine.com/upgrade.php
I ended up getting fair looking results; by the time I have the vegetation in place there is no sign of the blending at 25% other than channels/erosion.
Still, I would like to get some more small smallish (stream to creek) meandering channels/erosion. At the same time I need to make my tiles even smaller due to memory limitations. So:
-
Can you point to a something that would suffice as a tutorial for the process you mentioned above (I assume we are talking about building a massive heightmap for erosion and then utilizing that large single piece for the tiled build)
-
any tips for getting longer more narrow channels over flatter ground?