A question to people who use World Machine

Development World Creation
1

Hi,
I recently got into using (testing) World Machine and am quite interested in putting it into my workflow for at least some elements.
My results though, I am still not satisfied with them. The part lies in exporting the stuff to UE4 properly.

I have tried 2 ways, with a RGB based splatmap, and with 4 different heightmaps.
Heightmaps have worked alright in some terrains, but sometimes the results
are not what I expect, and my terrain lacks texture coordinates for the places where I would expect to have them.

Splatmap on the other hand… As seen in the picture below, all the RGB channels are full of those horizontal lines, that will
mess up the landscape textures when I set it up.
Am I missing some setup for the splatmaps, or should I forget about the splatmaps alltogether and instead try to figure how to get better
results from the heightmaps?

I am using the free version of WM currently btw, with texture limitations of 505. I want to figure this out before buying
license for it.
Thanks in advance for any help. :slight_smile:

2

Can you please attach your splat map and height map here? (The ones that are problematic).

3

Sure. This is just one example, as this happens to me every time with splatmap, same results.
The map seems ok now though, but something is wrong at my UE`s setting/import side I assume…

And now I can`t figure how to upload the r16 file here :p. Cant attach as an r16 file and Zip is “too big”.

4

Hmmm. I tried something I hadnt tried before; I set the WM output to BMP instead of PNG or Tiff which I had tried before. And I didnt get the horizontal line mess this time. So, I “kind” of got rid of my problem, but I am still not satisfied because I didn`t
fully realize the problem itself ^^;. Something with the alpha layer I guess… but just guess.

5

How are you creating your splat map?
Output the masks you want then put them in different channels yourself. The splat map creator in WM wasn’t quite good for me.

6

I saw a weirdly similar issue in L3DT when I exported the splat maps as PNGs. When I exported and imported them as TGA files it worked correctly.

7

Thanks, Ill try to play around that part a bit more. Even at my other solutions, the results really arent what I see in WM. They dont need to be 100% accurate though, hand polishing in UE4 still gives better quality for at least my project which doesnt aim at photorealism. Simply importing from WM doesnt make good levels for a game anyway.
Still, I try to experiment more so I can get most of the detail out of the tools and I can concentrate on hand fixing important aspects.