World Machine

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You need Terrain Creation software when you need to create a virtual world and your existing tools, if any, just won't do. World Machine provides you with exceptional power and proven, industry-setting terrain effects to help you create your vision. Whether you're a veteran development team or a lone-wolf independent artist, World Machine is for you. Here's a case study on three different kinds of users, and what they need from their terrain solution. I. Professional game developer, creating expansive and detailed virtual worlds. An excerpt from an interview with game designer Matthias Worch on using World Machine for the game Lair: What were your terrain needs, and why did you choose World Machine? We were making flight games, [and] our editor had the industry standard array of terrain tools ... those tools quickly proved inefficient when we switched to the next generation of console hardware (Xbox 360, PS3, and even the Wii). Hand-authored terrains simply didn't contain enough visual fidelity to do our new terrain rendering justice. How did World Machine improve your work and workflow? I'd back up a step, and say that World Machine made things possible that wouldn't have been possible at all. The erosion passes allowed us to create terrain detail that would have been impossible to paint by hand, and the "basic coverage" macros quickly generated masks we could use to generate textures to go along with the heightmap data. We had various macros that would take the basic height data the level designer had generated and would spit out fully eroded and masked out terrains ... We're talking 16x16k textures here, but luckily the 64bit Pro edition with tiled terrains helped out with that. ...It's unfortunate that of all the game we used World Machine on, only the very first iteration, Lair, made it to stores. Towards the end, we had fully normal mapped and mega-textured landscapes that looked even more spectacular than what shipped with Lair. Read the full interview for more insights!

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