Since WM actually generates procedural terrains a plug in or importer that does this so we can feed complete global terrains into TG2 will be fantastic. Right now saving files into height maps like on the old version seems like a step back.
That will give us access to all the erosion terrain modules and variations on WM :o
I wish WM would work with OSX :(
Quote from: BPauba on January 13, 2007, 03:00:58 PM
I wish WM would work with OSX :(
Ahh you and your mac again :P
MojoWorld creates procedural terrains, works on both Mac and Windows, and exports directly to .ter format.
Quote from: BPauba on January 13, 2007, 03:00:58 PM
I wish WM would work with OSX :(
Sorry of the blatant plug, but have you tried planetGenesis, which works on a Mac (and Windows, Linux and anywhere else Java runs) and exports to ter and obj format.
http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net (http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net)
Follow the where link at the top of the screen to download
Quote from: David Burnett on January 13, 2007, 04:22:43 PM
Quote from: BPauba on January 13, 2007, 03:00:58 PM
I wish WM would work with OSX :(
Sorry of the blatant plug, but have you tried planetGenesis, which works on a Mac (and Windows, Linux and anywhere else Java runs) and exports to ter and obj format.
http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net (http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net)
Follow the where link at the top of the screen to download
Actually I have! I wa wondering about functions and whatnot, and you pointed towards the program. I have downloaded it and am pretty interested in it. its not a plug, you are just trying to help me out, which you have. Is there any overview tutorials or documentation on planetgenesis?
If you think WM is good now, you should check out the Development Diary to see what Stephen Scmitt's got up his sleeve for the big release some time in the future:
http://www.world-machine.com/blog/ (http://www.world-machine.com/blog/)
I second that JimB :) Some kind of interoperability will be a even more advantageous. Working with good old heightfields will improve too...
monks
Neat, I can't wait for the next WM release now :) Also I wonder if it could be possable to make a pianting tool that was kinda like the one in .9x but it would allow 3d manipulation it would be helpful for over hangs.
Quote from: BPauba on January 13, 2007, 04:46:13 PM
Quote from: David Burnett on January 13, 2007, 04:22:43 PM
Quote from: BPauba on January 13, 2007, 03:00:58 PM
I wish WM would work with OSX :(
Sorry of the blatant plug, but have you tried planetGenesis, which works on a Mac (and Windows, Linux and anywhere else Java runs) and exports to ter and obj format.
http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net (http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net)
Follow the where link at the top of the screen to download
Actually I have! I wa wondering about functions and whatnot, and you pointed towards the program. I have downloaded it and am pretty interested in it. its not a plug, you are just trying to help me out, which you have. Is there any overview tutorials or documentation on planetgenesis?
There's a lack of tutorials but I did write a beginners help item in the sourceforge forum http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3667197 (http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3667197), the documentation is on the website at http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net/docs15/gui.html (http://planetgenesis.sourceforge.net/docs15/gui.html), the help link from the front page.
Quote from: calyxa on January 13, 2007, 03:54:10 PM
MojoWorld creates procedural terrains, works on both Mac and Windows, and exports directly to .ter format.
Yeah there are several ways to create a terrain in mac (and windows) but Mojo and many others Including WM will export a limited square height field not a procedural terrain readable by TG2 and applied to the complete planet.
In Mojoworld you export only what you set inside your parameter bomb. But you already know that ;)
What I was talking about its compatibility with the WM files and TG2 so you can feed the complete procedural network to TG and back.
In principal it sounds good, but how long would it take to use heavy erosion on an entire WM planet ??? Two years?
less then 5 minutes. depends on your computer, World Machine already mades a world (exploration mode)
Regards,
Will
Quote from: JimB on January 15, 2007, 06:23:37 PM
In principal it sounds good, but how long would it take to use heavy erosion on an entire WM planet ??? Two years?
You can apply much better erosion models right from WM
Quote from: Will on January 15, 2007, 06:27:54 PM
less then 5 minutes. depends on your computer, World Machine already mades a world (exploration mode)
On a 512x512 tiled part of the entire planet maybe, but not on the whole procedural terrain, no way. Are you saying you want repeated tiles, or you want an entire procedural landscape from WM?
Quote from: edlo on January 15, 2007, 06:35:54 PM
You can apply much better erosion models right from WM
Which is what I was talking about - within WM.
@JimB Is it tiled? I know they look the same while moving and such but I think that they are diffrent when you acauly select them. I could be wrong though, What I was saying is that you could create an entire world with erosion and what not in around five minutes I would, of course, depend on how much that 512x512 area would repersent on your planet if its only like the size of the default heightfeild then yes it would take a long time, but if (and this is what I was thinking) it took up maybe an sixth of a planet then it would not take long at all.
Regards,
Will
Quote from: JimB on January 16, 2007, 05:22:03 AM
Quote from: Will on January 15, 2007, 06:27:54 PM
less then 5 minutes. depends on your computer, World Machine already mades a world (exploration mode)
On a 512x512 tiled part of the entire planet maybe, but not on the whole procedural terrain, no way. Are you saying you want repeated tiles, or you want an entire procedural landscape from WM?
Quote from: edlo on January 15, 2007, 06:35:54 PM
You can apply much better erosion models right from WM
Which is what I was talking about - within WM.
Which is the whole point of these post; compatibility of WM files on TG2, not terrains...Files, and yes WM applies weathering and erosion to the complete procedural model.
Okay, I think I see what you're driving at. But, if, for example, you created a nice Perlin procedural terrain in WM and added an erosion node, etc, and then imported that into TG2, wouldn't it still have to calculate the erosion on the perlin terrain anyway, somewhere down the line? I don't know how powerful your PC's are, but doing the final build on a 2048x2048 tile in WM with extra quality settings on the erosion can take up to half an hour on my machine - and it ain't the slowest in the world. I don't see why the same thing wouldn't have to happen in TG2.
No matter what, the procedure has to be calculated on the heightfield to get the final terrain.
Quote from: JimB on January 16, 2007, 11:40:27 AM
Okay, I think I see what you're driving at. But, if, for example, you created a nice Perlin procedural terrain in WM and added an erosion node, etc, and then imported that into TG2, wouldn't it still have to calculate the erosion on the perlin terrain anyway, somewhere down the line? I don't know how powerful your PC's are, but doing the final build on a 2048x2048 tile in WM with extra quality settings on the erosion can take up to half an hour on my machine - and it ain't the slowest in the world. I don't see why the same thing wouldn't have to happen in TG2.
No matter what, the procedure has to be calculated on the heightfield to get the final terrain.
What WM does right now when you do the 2048x2048 terrain its rendering the information onto a height field that you selected, either a .ter file a .bmp or any other, and then you load that onto TG 9.43 OR TG .
So it takes a long time because it is rendering an image; if you could import the node file onto TG2 the result would be the same as when you add a power fractal, which does not take years to apply and covers the whole planet.
With this compatibility you would be able to build up your own power fractal or alpine fractal terrains to be used on TG2.
Cheers.
^What I was trying to get arcoss, sorry.
Regards,
Will
Quote from: edlo on January 16, 2007, 12:57:25 PM
Quote from: JimB on January 16, 2007, 11:40:27 AM
Okay, I think I see what you're driving at. But, if, for example, you created a nice Perlin procedural terrain in WM and added an erosion node, etc, and then imported that into TG2, wouldn't it still have to calculate the erosion on the perlin terrain anyway, somewhere down the line? I don't know how powerful your PC's are, but doing the final build on a 2048x2048 tile in WM with extra quality settings on the erosion can take up to half an hour on my machine - and it ain't the slowest in the world. I don't see why the same thing wouldn't have to happen in TG2.
No matter what, the procedure has to be calculated on the heightfield to get the final terrain.
What WM does right now when you do the 2048x2048 terrain its rendering the information onto a height field that you selected, either a .ter file a .bmp or any other, and then you load that onto TG 9.43 OR TG .
So it takes a long time because it is rendering an image; if you could import the node file onto TG2 the result would be the same as when you add a power fractal, which does not take years to apply and covers the whole planet.
With this compatibility you would be able to build up your own power fractal or alpine fractal terrains to be used on TG2.
Cheers.
That's not really true - the "rendering an image" part of it has very little impact on calculation time. It's just that many of WM's functions are very processor intensive, similar to TG2's own erosion and Heightfield Generate algorithms, both of which take a bit of time. Loading a WM file in TG2 could be great and I'd love to see that supported, but it's not going to make generation of even a finite area of WM terrain any faster, let alone an entire planet. Erosion in particular is a highly demanding, iterative process. To do it at any decent resolution on a whole planet would take ages - days at least, if not weeks.
It depends of course on the resolution of each tile you were working with. The Explorer mode in WM does seem fairly fast but there are several things working to your advantage in that case. 1 is that the tiles are generated progressively (they start out at low resolution and then are updated with higher resolution versions as they are generated), 2 they are less detailed the further away from the camera they are, and 3 they have a detail cap of 256 pixels square maximum (usually set to 128 or lower for speed reasons). If those resolution limits were acceptable to you then total planet generation might be done in an acceptable time of a day or less. But this doesn't take into account the memory and hard drive use of all these tiles either.
All that being said there is actually a way that a WM plugin could do some pretty cool stuff by working with the WM base networks and procedural functions, but visualizing them in a TG2 way - *at render time*. The reality is that TG2 doesn't pre-generate an entire planet, it visualizes only the detail it needs for each particular render, during the render itself. If it had to precompute an entire planet it would take ages, just like WM. So if a WM plugin could do the same that would be great - you could have the versatility of WM terrains but with theoretically infinite detail and planetary coverage. The only major issue I see is in making functions that are non-procedural (e.g. erosion) work in this way. I think it would be quite difficult to make erosion work properly in such a situation. But I'd love to hear otherwise from Stephen as this would be a fantastic addition to TG2 for sure. :)
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on January 19, 2007, 07:36:29 PM
Quote from: edlo on January 16, 2007, 12:57:25 PM
Quote from: JimB on January 16, 2007, 11:40:27 AM
Okay, I think I see what you're driving at. But, if, for example, you created a nice Perlin procedural terrain in WM and added an erosion node, etc, and then imported that into TG2, wouldn't it still have to calculate the erosion on the perlin terrain anyway, somewhere down the line? I don't know how powerful your PC's are, but doing the final build on a 2048x2048 tile in WM with extra quality settings on the erosion can take up to half an hour on my machine - and it ain't the slowest in the world. I don't see why the same thing wouldn't have to happen in TG2.
No matter what, the procedure has to be calculated on the heightfield to get the final terrain.
What WM does right now when you do the 2048x2048 terrain its rendering the information onto a height field that you selected, either a .ter file a .bmp or any other, and then you load that onto TG 9.43 OR TG .
So it takes a long time because it is rendering an image; if you could import the node file onto TG2 the result would be the same as when you add a power fractal, which does not take years to apply and covers the whole planet.
With this compatibility you would be able to build up your own power fractal or alpine fractal terrains to be used on TG2.
Cheers.
That's not really true - the "rendering an image" part of it has very little impact on calculation time. It's just that many of WM's functions are very processor intensive, similar to TG2's own erosion and Heightfield Generate algorithms, both of which take a bit of time. Loading a WM file in TG2 could be great and I'd love to see that supported, but it's not going to make generation of even a finite area of WM terrain any faster, let alone an entire planet. Erosion in particular is a highly demanding, iterative process. To do it at any decent resolution on a whole planet would take ages - days at least, if not weeks.
It depends of course on the resolution of each tile you were working with. The Explorer mode in WM does seem fairly fast but there are several things working to your advantage in that case. 1 is that the tiles are generated progressively (they start out at low resolution and then are updated with higher resolution versions as they are generated), 2 they are less detailed the further away from the camera they are, and 3 they have a detail cap of 256 pixels square maximum (usually set to 128 or lower for speed reasons). If those resolution limits were acceptable to you then total planet generation might be done in an acceptable time of a day or less. But this doesn't take into account the memory and hard drive use of all these tiles either.
All that being said there is actually a way that a WM plugin could do some pretty cool stuff by working with the WM base networks and procedural functions, but visualizing them in a TG2 way - *at render time*. The reality is that TG2 doesn't pre-generate an entire planet, it visualizes only the detail it needs for each particular render, during the render itself. If it had to precompute an entire planet it would take ages, just like WM. So if a WM plugin could do the same that would be great - you could have the versatility of WM terrains but with theoretically infinite detail and planetary coverage. The only major issue I see is in making functions that are non-procedural (e.g. erosion) work in this way. I think it would be quite difficult to make erosion work properly in such a situation. But I'd love to hear otherwise from Stephen as this would be a fantastic addition to TG2 for sure. :)
- Oshyan
Brilliant now we have all the facts so it would be possible and would be a great addition to TG2 but if the list of procedural and procedural affecting nodes grows beyond that of power fractal or alpine fractal we wont need WM at all. The only difference I see now between WM nodes and TG2 nodes are that WM nodes are much more terrain function oriented, instead of just function oriented which makes it easier to understand them individually and the effect that will cause to your terrain.
So its just a matter of user friendly nodes ;D
Quote from: OshyanThat's not really true - the "rendering an image" part of it has very little impact on calculation time. It's just that many of WM's functions are very processor intensive, similar to TG2's own erosion and Heightfield Generate algorithms, both of which take a bit of time. Loading a WM file in TG2 could be great and I'd love to see that supported, but it's not going to make generation of even a finite area of WM terrain any faster, let alone an entire planet. Erosion in particular is a highly demanding, iterative process. To do it at any decent resolution on a whole planet would take ages - days at least, if not weeks.
Like I was trying to get across ;)
Perhaps a chan file import/export to calculate and create the tiles in WM for use in TG2 would be an option? I.e., the visible areas in a TG2 animation are calculated within WM without the need to erode, etc, an entire planet, and only those necessary terrain tiles exported from WM to into TG2.
I have no plans to give up on WM, and would love to see the two apps co-operate in that way.
World Machine and Terragen have always worked well together and I expect that to continue in the future. I too would love to see closer integration between the two, and with the more robust SDK that will be provided for TG2, it could well be possible. We'll just have to wait and see. :)
- Oshyan
Is there no support then for importing tiled worlds from World Machine into TG? Have people done it manually?
monks
No direct support at present, but it's a good idea. I think it could be done manually, though I don't know how involved that might be. It would be made easier if there is Georeferencing support in WM.
I definitely want to see interoperability with apps like WM improve in the future.
- Oshyan
Hmm, I'll have to go with a single terrain.
monks
There's a tiled TG2 generator here:
http://terragen2.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/continent-scale-heightmaps/
monks
Nice util!
- Oshyan