Stabler. Faster. More Powerful.

We set out to make World Machine 2.3 a simple bug fix release. It grew to be more than that.

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Add variety with a Height Chooser

Creating worlds with convincingly varying terrain character has always been difficult. It has gotten a bit easier thanks to this new device.

Create a simple grayscale guide map and any number of terrain type inputs. The Height Choooser will decide which terrain to place where according to the guide map, smoothly blending between them.

What’s more, you also get mask outputs showing where each terrain type was placed — very useful for further processing or texturing.

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Making a.. Splat.

World Machine has always been able to produce excellent color maps for texturing. WM 2.3 introduces an exciting new way to manipulate your texture masks.

The Splat Converter is a mask manipulation device that was designed to improve the ability to create so-called “splatmaps” or “weightmaps” for some modern game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. A splatmap is essentially a guide bitmap indicating the influence of different terrain textures at each pixel.

The Splat Converter helps you manipulate your masks destined for splatting. You can choose which material blends to favor, the exclusion amount (contrast), and of course enforce sums-to-one behavior across your masks. The Splat Converter supports up to 16 channel splatmap sets for your highly varied scenes!

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Colorizer

The Colorizer is a simple but powerful way to define texture colormaps.

The example above uses only a single Colorizer to achieve all of its texturing!

You’ll find yourself using this handy new device all over the place in your texturing networks.

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Multiple Monitor Support

Pro Edition Only

If you have multiple monitors, you probably don’t need to be told how useful they are!

The Professional Edition now has multiple monitor support. Keep any views you want open on your additional monitor(s).

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Improved Tiling

Pro Edition Only

Sometimes you need to export a large and detailed world region that doesn’t fit well into a rectangle.

The Tiled build engine now has support for exporting a complex tileset instead of a complete regular grid. Although the tiles are still indexed on a grid, you can choose to export only certain tiles to better handle irregular map areas without wasting time building areas you do not need.

Tiled Input is similarly updated with support for missing tiles and pickable import regions.

In addition, tiles with non-square dimensions are now fully supported.

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Higher Limits. Higher Performance

As the steady march of technology has continued, higher and higher resolutions become possible.

Accordingly, all of the resolution limits in World Machine have been raised to let you work with higher detail previews, views, and builds.

Of course, you will need a powerful workstation to perform at the new maximums. Luckily, some of the remaining power-hungry devices have been multithreaded for higher performance. In addition, the Professional Edition can now use up to 32 cores!

Also helping out, in a nice free upgrade the Standard Edition has gained 64bit support and 2-way multithreading.

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Play Better with Others

Some highly requested improvements have been made to the import and export options of World Machine:

• You can now import DXF polylines with elevations!

  A long requested feature, your Layout Generators can now import spline and line shapes with elevations from your favorite 3D software into World Machine. This makes it easy to imprint your terrain with geometry that you’ve already laid out instead of having to replicate it inside of World Machine.

• A highly requested feature, meshes may now be exported with their UV coordinates attached. For some workflows this cuts out an additional stop to assign a planar mapping.

  Additionally, tiled-build meshes are now placed automatically in their proper worldspace location so that your meshes line up right away.

• For the first time, World Machine can preserve all geolocation metadata using the .BT file format. You can now export your real world heightfields from GIS applications like Global Mapper, perform image processing on the heightfields, and save out the modified files with their geolocation data intact (including writing a new .prj file).

  The world file shown to the right is an outline of how it’s done. Just connect the pass-through metadata output and inputs and you’re good to go!

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Extensive New Examples

Learning how to use complex graphics software can be intimidating.
To help out, we took some time to create a collection of several dozen new example files for World Machine.

These files consist of both technique demonstrations and also more general example scenes for you to pick apart and see how they work. Whether you’re importing and improving real world data, texturing, using layouts, or simulating lava…

We also added a “Open Example” menu shortcut to make the examples even easier to get at.

All of the illustrations on this page are images from an example world. Look them up if you’re curious. And enjoy!

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and some Small Touches…

There are plenty of smaller improvements that nonetheless can be a real boon. These include:

You can now set a base elevation for the world that can be below zero. This small but important change makes matching to real world datasets a bit easier.

World Machine now creates a handy palette of your most recently used devices along with any of your customized Favorites quick access list.

Motion Blur can now be performed at any heading!

You can now export 8 or 16bit per channel TIFF and PNG bitmap output files

… and other even smaller details all across the program (for example, parameters in a device might now properly enable or disable themselves).

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Major Bug Fixes

World Machine 2.3 was originally planned to be only a bug fix release. Even though we slipped more than a few new features into the release, the original goal was not forgotten. Quite a number of issues identified in previous versions of World Machine have been fixed.

Memory-related errata in particular were heavily targeted. We remodeled many parts of the core codebase to help prevent future issues and make future releases happen faster!

A Few of the Errata and Issues Fixed…

Crash when ATI Radeon driver has triple buffering + vsynch
When importing tilesets that are partial, need a way to specify overall bounds
Should really build necessary blend neighbors when selectively exporting tiles
Made clamp find extents work again
Ramp now takes larger values
Fixed regression where path falloff didn't work
Made detail, difference mode work in RGB/scalar combo
Paths with only one vertex now simply have that height at all values
Subdivide vertex now works correctly in closed paths when vertex is beginning or end.
Fixed preset listbox not being tall enough
You can now dismiss tabbed worlds directly, rather than having to first select that tab.
Fixed bug where Equalizer never captures sample
Fixed bug which occurred with multiple render extents not updating their tile reporting properly
Erosion flowmaps not masked
Crash when inserting empty macro
Crash in splitter
Crash saving after deleting a routing point
Leftside view cannot show 2D overlay view
Non-square tiled terrain export errors
Clicking on TFI tile size boxes cause extents to change
Non-square TIFF files import wrong
Routes broken when copy/pasting macro?
New Groups start with broken alpha
Pasting devices removes route points
Bank Selector wierd pt2
Bank Selector wierdness
cant save sessions when text packets are in world
Paths in program options are not directly settable
File Input crashes if HFZ file not present
Sessions are broken.. sometimes
Drop curve to surface sometimes crashes
World Machine crash at startup
After adjusting shape, following devices are not re-built
PNG file export bug on massive size worlds
3D view z-fighting of water plane
Disconnecting a wire falsifies the current device when it shoudln't
Very large worlds causes erosion mishap; possibly other devices too
Mesh Output with quads displays wrong
Right click deleting a wire doesn't falsify
Changing device by clicking on wire or route point causes issues
Routing additional wires through existing RPs causes collapse
Cancel while blending does not cancel immediately
Tiled Build has small memory leak during blending?
Tiled Mesh output not correctly located
Select Color does not disable parameters properly
worlds are not saving lighting angle
lines disappear in layout view on selection
Converting to macro doesnt recognize when multiple wires belong to same devices
subdividing polygon only adds vertex on one side
TMD freezing WM on load
WM 2.2 Crashes on load with stranded route points
Updated device parameters dont show up
Build when already built does not  finish
Welded vertices behave oddly when subdivided
Tiff import
Breaklink doesn't falsify its output. why did this change?
Selecting non-visible (parameter) devices in a macroworld, or maybe any world, does not update leftside preview
Erosive Power Slider odd
Advanced Perlin Numeric setting
tiling numbering
Crash on load
Going above 160 size preview causes pixelation
Erosion dialog: changing strength of filter effects geo enhancement
Blur device Motion blur does not work
Overlay view does not update color table
Moving device origin with wheels does not properly update remaing network behind
WM Crash from building
TFI bug: extents output crashes world machine
mesh not compatible yet with new display system
size mismatch on previews inside macros
Thermal Weathering - can you enable hyperthreding on this device too?
Macro Parameter names / options not taking
Select Color failure
"Delete Device!" deletes Group instead
VBO checkbox does not stay checked
bitmap output flipped
Seamfixing checked in layout view causes display irregularities
Conserve mem checkbox
On multiple monitors, dragging WM to 2nd monitor causes erratic behavior
Advanced Perlin Persistence guide wonky
RGB Tiff Export sometimes interpreted wrongly by other apps

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