{"id":269,"date":"2012-06-29T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-06-29T10:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world-machine.com\/blog\/?p=269"},"modified":"2012-07-02T21:12:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T21:12:18","slug":"269","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/269\/","title":{"rendered":"June Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, what’s been percolating behind the scenes in the past while with World Machine?<\/p>\n

Mostly things like bugfixing, business-side, and other custom work. I believe that 2.3 Beta-3 is starting to achieve very solid status; there are only a few more things I want to get into line before final release.<\/p>\n

I’m writing here, however, about a new feature. Even though I’ve sworn to myself to feature-freeze 2.3, I find that the allure of working on a few small things from the feature-request backlog sometimes gets to be too much. Which explains the reason for this post…<\/p>\n

Take a look at this screen capture straight out of World Machine:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

There’s nothing obviously strange about this image, but it’s showing off a couple very cool new features that, despite being small, will revolutionize the way people texture with World Machine.<\/p>\n

In particular, this image is using the new Colorizer tool to create custom textures. The existing Colorizer was only ever meant to simply allow you to use the built-in colortables in your texturing schemes. That can be useful, but is of only limited power.<\/p>\n

The new colorizer allows you to quickly create custom RGB gradients. But far from simply using them as a height-color lookup table, in my experiments so far I’ve found them to be indispensible for practically every texturing purpose. Any time you want to vary color based on a heightfield<\/strong>, the new colorizer is now your go-to tool<\/strong>. Whether that means a gradient based on height, slope, erosion status, or practically anything else — being able to quickly map your input to a custom set of colors is huge.<\/p>\n

In particular, in the image above I created a rough grassy pattern using a couple noise devices, then drove a colorizer with it to get a nice mottled grasslands color set. I did the same thing for the dirty areas, then Choose between the two based on slope\/erosion data.<\/p>\n

One other last interesting trick: \u00a0You may notice there’s alot of “rough” feel to the surface; I plugged a small collection of nodes together to effectively combine the texture with a surface texture heightmap and bake the resulting light+bump map into the surface texture. This is a cheap, but fun, hack.<\/p>\n

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

So, what’s been percolating behind the scenes in the past while with World Machine? Mostly things like bugfixing, business-side, and other custom work. I believe that 2.3 Beta-3 is starting to achieve very solid status; there are only a few more things I want to get into line before final release. I’m writing here, however, […]<\/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":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-machine-pro-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","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=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}