Wow, time flies quickly!<\/p>\n
Various bits and pieces are in progress at the moment. But instead of talking about this-or-that bug fixed and progress made, I want to talk about a recent forum post that jogged my memory!<\/p>\n
Recently, a WM user was asking about using texture atlases. This is actually a rather interesting question, as so far people are generally using WM to create megatextures.<\/p>\n
(As an aside, World Machine does this very well but could also improve itself in several ways —\u00a0 efficient Megatexture creation of a resolution some fair multiple higher than heightfield resolution is one of the big improvements I want to push through in the next version.)<\/p>\n
Back to texture atlases. They are a very space-efficient way of texturing, with the downside that you cannot blend textures easily and thus can only have one type of texture at a time at a given spot.<\/p>\n
So if you have a continuum of texturing expressiveness, it would go like:<\/p>\n
texture atlas\u00a0 <->\u00a0 multiple texture blending maps <-> megatextures<\/strong><\/p>\n The reason why I bring this up is that both of the texturing options on the left are quite similar — you could think of a texture atlas as simply a 1bit blending map. I had a device that didn’t make the cut into WM 2 Final (and then into 2.2 Final) that was intended to be a texture blending map generator. The main reason why it didn’t make it was that it was not as powerful as simply creating a texture network from scratch, and it also didn’t very well support creating a megatexture.<\/p>\n However, as I’ve seen from the enduring popularity of the Basic Coverage macro, a device doesn’t need to be excessively complex to be useful! Especially if it creates good looking results. I’m going to have to see if I can’t resurrect that experimental device into a future update!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wow, time flies quickly! Various bits and pieces are in progress at the moment. But instead of talking about this-or-that bug fixed and progress made, I want to talk about a recent forum post that jogged my memory! Recently, a WM user was asking about using texture atlases. This is actually a rather interesting question, […]<\/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":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-machine-development-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","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=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}