{"id":1159,"date":"2026-08-14T05:50:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T05:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/?p=1159"},"modified":"2026-08-14T05:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T05:56:08","slug":"experiments-and-musings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/experiments-and-musings\/","title":{"rendered":"Experiments and Musings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m still working on the various release-related stuff for 4066. There’s lots of small fixes and improvements for the website, as well as hopefully sending out a newsletter soon. If you don’t even remember when the last time you received one was, thats because it was a long time ago \ud83d\ude1b Desperately trying to do better on comms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An experiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Onwards. I had a few hours free tonight and decided to play with an idea. As a quick refresh, VDMs let you have all kinds of 3D overhangs, but topologically you can’t have any holes. It’s like a sheet of stretchy paper – you can bend and distort it into all kinds of interesting ways, but at the end of the day its a connected sheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For terrain that’s a pretty good trade! Even extremely detailed terrain can be essentially fully captured in all its 3D complexity. If you haven’t played with it yet in Dragontail<\/a>, you should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The notable exception is something that almost everyone wants to make at some point though: Arches. This is an experiment to be able to create those too with VDMs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhat surprisingly, almost all the capabilities needed to experiment with this are already present in Dragontail! The key is the Meshify device, which takes both a VDM and a mask — that lets you cut away parts of the sheet you don’t want to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s my experiment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started out with this shape. Essentially, it’s a gaussian bump heightfield with two holes punched into the side, all the way through until they come out the other side:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The pink areas are the back of the other side extruding all the way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, just feed that to the meshify device with a mask that cuts away the backfacing sections and viola:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Add a couple layers of VDM noise and some thermal weathering and:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That’s really not too bad!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of the detailing devices involved (noise, weathering) actually understand the surface masking, but its intriguing enough to think about for future actual use…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still working on the various release-related stuff for 4066. There’s lots of small fixes and improvements for the website, as well as hopefully sending out a newsletter soon. If you don’t even remember when the last time you received one was, thats because it was a long time ago \ud83d\ude1b Desperately trying to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"publish_to_discourse":"","publish_post_category":"20","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"1","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"39924","discourse_permalink":"https:\/\/forum.world-machine.com\/t\/experiments-and-musings\/8525","wpdc_publishing_response":"success","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dayinthelife","category-random-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1165,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions\/1165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}