Love to let the eyes wander across impressive vistas? So do we! And we love to convey that grandeur of nature in 3d as well. To help you to get started here are some terrains you might want to try.
There are tools like Vue D’Esprit that provide complete solutions to render impressive terrains, no doubt. Terragen is another veteran, that can produce amazing results. While they might yield great results, our team at xoio never could build up a longterm relationship with those, because integrating them into our pipeline proved hard – having their own renderengines and other factors.
That’s when we came across Worldmachine – quite a name it has and it indeed advertises with the slogan “be god for a day“. Honestly, this is what it is about. Worldmachine was always great fun to use – it’s exciting to watch erosions dig channels into your landscapes.
Probably the best feature of worldmachine” is barely mentioned: It is so easy to integrate into all kind of pipelines. The software outpouts either bitmaps of various types or HiRes-Mesh-OBJs. Since outputs are also connected as nodes it is totally up to you whatever information you want to get.
That’s why it can be used in Zbrush, Unreal Engine, Unity, Photoshop … and of course any 3d-package you want!
So enough praise of worldmachine as a software. Since we have been tinkering with WM for several years, we decided to give out a set of terrains we generated. It would be a shame to let them all rot away on a harddrive – rather share them on xoio-air.
1. Tropical Island
A central peninsula, that is of volcanic structure and has a wide beach area. To preserve memory, it can be repeated across a bigger water areas, since its borders all submerge under the waterline.
2. Canyonscape
Erosion-simulations are impressive and yield fascinating structures. This canyon mesa features an enclosed valley and a valley that could deliver fascinating flythroughs.
3. Alpine Mountainscape
Worldmachine has an interesting snow simulator – Snow is blown into cracks and fills holes while peaks stay free. This combines with some matching texturing options to give you this himalaya feel.
4. Single Mountain peak
Especially if you need to fill a large area with mountains you will find this one usefull. Since its borders all down at zero level you can either place them on a plane or have them interact to generate large mountainareas with proxies for instance.
So, we hope you can enjoy this set of free terrains – and we would be pleased to see you what you actively have done with them! And maybe you feel to have a test at worldmachine yourself?
Happy terraforming,
Best, xoio