For me who works on large area fantasy maps, tiled and water improvements would be a godsend, especially if they are working together. A lake a river system that worked across tiles is what I miss the most, bare terrain tiles really well already, it’s when you introduce lakes and rivers it’s getting bad. At the moment I must do 5 to six steps matching each tiles manually afterwards to try and make rivers and lakes to work across tiles.
What I would love to see is a data type that can store and then feed back data across tiles. Like a river reaching the edge of a tile, its off flow could be fed into the next tile. The same with lakes, and I would be a very happy camper. I can imagine this being useful for all sorts of things like forest masks and more. To be able to do the same for horizontal slicing of terrains as well would be amazing. I work with tall mountains and often have to resort to keep the lower lands in a separate file from the highlands, and to have rivers that can cascade down valleys across files without having to correct them afterwards would save me days and weeks of work.
Climate and Biomes would be interesting as a way to fee data into textures and materials, but not as much of a time saver for me. A lot of this can be done with shapes and selections already.
Geolocation of render extents and exported files would be another godsend, to be ale to export out GeoTIFF’s for example. This would be, for me at least, be even better than working on sphere, you can use GIS tools for the rest, and the result would work right away. If you could import geolocated content as well would be equally useful, masks, roads and stuff would be great .
Population tools that could better accommodate for vegetation along rivers or even buildings along roads would be a great addition as well .
Now comes the stuff I’m reading of, and that would be a “roof” tool. A device that could create more believable roofs on my elevated “knobs” I create for houses on my maps. Just as addons to the heightmap, or now with VDM functions it could be even more elaborate. I’m really looking forward to testing it, but something didn’t work with my alpha license and now my main machine is a bit iffy with WM4 over all, having to re-register every time start the program. It works but becomes a bit tedious over time.
Here are some screenshots of what I’m working on now, a 64K map of a pat of the D&D setting of Greyhawk. It is being developed at 5feet per pixel in resolution, detailed enough to see buildings and trees, useful in everything from large area overviews to battle maps. My plan is to map the whole setting at this resolution over the next decade or so, so every improvement in the tools would be VERY helpful. I’m working on the edge of what can be done at the moment, which has been my hallmark since I started with Bryce in the 1990’s mapping Greyhawk. Now I’m ding it all over again and would love to be able to use World Machine the hole way through this project. I’ve been using WM for over a decade now and it’s my daily driver. I often swear at it, but to be honest I love it. I’ve tested almost every other terrain creation tool I have found, and probable spent over $1000 and many weeks of my time trying to find something better. In my humble opinion there is nothing that can’ beat WM for doing what I’m doing. It is still tedious and very limited, but it is possible to map a fantasy world in 3D using it, but you must use lots of workarounds. Hopefully future versions can make it easier.
I have to workstations and a powerful laptop to run things, and I can work on one machine and render on the other. 128GB of RAM on both workstations, a Framework 16 with 92GB of ram a 5070 Nvidia and fast SSD scratch disks on all machines. 8TB on each of the workstations and on my Framework make even the largest renders feasible. What used to take 18-20 hours a decade ago can now be done in an hour or two. Raw render power increase is less important for me, to be able to cut down on the amount of manual correction and Photoshop editing I must do would be way more important to speed up my workflow. I used to have to sit and wait for renders to finish, now its way more the other way around, my machines sit idle because I haven’t fixed mask editing or some other correction.
WM is an amazing tool that has the potential to be even better, way better. I might only be a solitary fantasy cartographer, but the interest in fantasy map making is huge, and a tool like World Machine could go from a great but difficult tool to become a dream tool in this field. The results are unrivaled. Below are a few samples of what I’m working on.
