The price listed on our website is the selling price - it might change a bit once the final is released but currently we do not intend it.
Please understand that I will not compare other terrain tools with ours - that is a task that users would have to do. Of course I did check Houdini 16 Terrain Tools and yes, I do have a clear opinion of a comparison which goes clear to our advantage from our point of view. World Creator is a dedicated procedural terrain and landscape generator. Hence, it is a highly specialized product. We will put new videos on our website next week showing a lot of new features in the current BETA.
I am currently playing around with World Creator 2 BETA stand alone and over the last month as it is approaching the RC build I can say that it’s really coming together well. WC2 -> UE4 workflow has improved dramatically now that we can directly export heatmaps of the terrain for each texture applied. These maps import directly into your terrain layers without modification.
Tiling will be available soon for large terrain but until then I tried a repeating terrain using 1kmx1km tiles and set it up to import 6 by 2 grid in world composition to test out landscape LOD and it jut worked. Seeing mountains far away go from static mesh to landscape was great.
I would love to be able to make landscape terrain, then turn it into tiled static mesh terrain with vertex color on the perimeter vertices. Would such thing be possible ?
They have been saying that “tiling will be available soon” since the first announcement. I am beginning to believe that that absolutely necessary feature will never show up.
Recently they added an export to obj option. I originally started using that for my test of world composition but then I saw the LOD option in UE4 that does it for you. One nice feature if you want all your tiles to have the same height at their edges is you can set an area to cover only the edges and blend any terrain into that edge. Then assign an imported flat heightmap to that area or paint it or use the flatten filter and then export to obj.
You can also just do the same thing in a paint program on he outputted heightmap though and then generate your meshes within which ever 3d modelling software you are using to convert to static mesh.
Tiling is a very important feature and should be in the RC. I think they announced 2-3 more beta before the first RC.
They’ve just added sliders to change the origin in the heightmap and are working on unlimited terrain size (not GPU bound) for the next release. These should be precursor to tiling.
Inside World Creator, tiling is not needed since you can create and render whatever terrain size you want and internally World Creator does not use tiles.
BUT, of course it will be possible to EXPORT the terrain as TILES (either as separate height maps OR as OBJ files) - this is something that we will put in as one of the last features, just before release
$289 is annual. It`is subscription model?
World Creator 2 Standalone versions for Windows, Mac and Linux are being developed using the Unity Engine C#?
Because of this there is no total C++ integration as Unreal Engine Plugin enabled inside Unreal Editor? But my guess may be wrong OK!!!
Im not the developer but I can answer some of these(and they can correct me if I’m mistaken).
$289 indie/professional license is a standalone perpetual seat license for that version(all minor updates). Only the enterpsie version requires a yearly renewal.
Standalone WC2 is indeed a unity program.
There is currently no C++ integration with UE4(or any integration). However the ways it’s implemented doesn’t prevent it from being used inside UE4, and it’s my belief their (eventual) intention is to make this into an engine plugin in the same way the unity plugin works; however that is separate from the stand alone version.
When is the mac version going to be available? I need to make a purchase of world creation tools soon (as in months ago) and if there is no mac version available I’ll have to go with vue or one of the other competitors.
So I took the plunge and bought it. A few forewarnings for anybody considering purchasing, and also for reference I am a beginner in terrain generation and only have about 5 months with unreal on the dev side so far, and about another 5 months in mod experience. In one short phrase, it’s not production ready yet, at least not in my opinion. One critical bug is the lack of saving, so you will only be able to export heightmaps to save your work for now. It seems this is being worked on but there’s no real date given (I’d imagine this would need to be resolved before beta ends in a week or so).
Quality wise it looks pretty good while inside WC2, however I’ve spent the better part of a day trying to get the generated terrain in unreal to look the same as it does in the WC2 viewport, with no luck yet.
The learning curve seems a bit steep at first, since there’s no real preset (at least that I found) to guide you in creating your first terrain with it, and only a view videos showing some of the features (most of their videos are focused on the unity version it seems, which does not share the same UI as the standalone version, making finding tutorials or help even more difficult). That said, once you figure out the UI you can blast through creating a terrain pretty quick.
Support seems slow, they advertise a 3 day turn around which feels kinda slow this day in age, however they are up front about this so can’t really fault them there.
Then there’s a rather disturbing comment from one of the developers on the forum stating various video drivers may lead to different generation results, which puts me in a slight panic tbh (since I’m now relying on this SW for my terrain generation needs). That said they did say eventually you will be able to turn off GPU generation, and use CPU only generation, which will lead to predictable results, however this feels like it’s missing the main selling point of the application.
So in short again, I can’t recommend it at this time. Again, I have minimal experience in this area so definitely check out their videos to see if it will meet your needs before taking my word for it.
Save / Load will be fully available in the firs RC.
When exporting terrains to other applications you need to know how those applications import the data - there are multiple possibilities and World Creator supports them all. For example: 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, little endian, big endian, normalizes, non normalized. We will do some videos on how o export properly into Unreal and Unity but it works as it has been done several times through users of our community.
The support got a bit slow right now since we are close to release - anyways, 3 days is not that much for a small team.
Yes, GPU generation depends on the driver you have installed. If it is buggy, it might lead to different results - that is why driver updates usually solve such issues.
We are going to upload new videos for the Standalone version only this week since the first RC is coming this week for all BETA testers. Those videos will show how to use World Creator.
we wanted to do a full asset for Unreal (same as we did in Unity) but honestly, it never would have been such powerful than the current Standalone version for Windows (Mac and Linux). So we completely made another decision on this:
World Creator will have a Sync-Tool (for FREE) in the Asset Store (Unity and Unreal). With that tool you can quickly re-create a World Creator Standalone project inside Unreal. Of course, the Standalone version is required but the handling will be very very simple. Just select the Standalone project and hit SYNC (you will be able to install a folder watcher). Then, it will re-create the terrain inside Unreal and you will be able to quickly drag’n drop your own assets into the proper slots like trees, grass and whatever you have. Each time you change something inside World Creator and hit save, the Sync-Tool will get the changes and update itself.
The development will start in three weeks and should be finished very quickly since it is quite a simple tool. I guess something around 3 or 4 weeks until finished. And this time we will start with the Unreal plugin and fire the Unity plugin after we have finished the Unreal one - promised!
That SYNC-Tool will be included in the Standalone package as well.
- it’s not that long to wait anymore.