10.Areas

An area is a multi-functional and an extremely powerful and flexible tool. You can use it to:

▪ create blend-maps (masks)

▪ create biomes

▪ import existing heightmaps to compose your terrain through stamping

▪ create your own custom heightmaps using World Creators’ paint tools

▪ generate flow-maps

▪ paint filters, textures, objects and details

As you have seen in the previous chapters, an area, can be applied to the base terrain generator, to filters, to objects, and details.

Areas can be moved, scaled to any size, and rotated. To move an area, click on the area inside the viewport and hold down the left mouse button while mowing the cursor. To scale an area, simply click and hold the left mouse button down, while dragging one of the corners of an area. To rotate an area, click outside an area and hold the left mouse button down while moving the cursor.

But before we dive into the specific features of an area, it is important to know about several tweaks that can be made within World Creator to improve performance while working with areas. This is especially of interest for user with a low-end GPU.

Under the General tab within the Area tab, you can adjust some settings that might help you to improve the overall performance:

With Skip Filters on Move enabled, you tell World Creator not to apply filters while moving / scaling / rotating an area. However, the filters are immediately applied as soon as any move operation has ended.

With Skip Filters on Paint enabled, you tell World Creator not to apply filters while performing paint operations on a Blend-Map and / or Height-Map of an area. However, the filters are immediately applied as soon as any paint operation has ended.

Working with Blend-Maps

By default, each area you create has a blend-map which acts like a mask but extends a typical mask with blending functionality. Hence, it does not only encode where something is but also with which probability (blending – the strength of the encoded pixel of a mask) – see below:

There are different ways of how to create a blend-map. By default, a standard blend-map is created that covers the entire Area.

Blend-Maps can also be saved to file (Save), filled (Fill), cleared (Clear), blurred (Blur) and they even can be created through a Filter (e.g. flow-maps, more on that later).

If Show Blend-Map is checked, the blend-map is drawn on the terrain surface. However, sometimes you might want to see the underlying terrain without the blend-map.

If Show Border is checked, the blend-maps outer edges are drawn on the terrain. This helps you to adjust the Border Blend Range with which you can control the blending behavior of the Blend-Map.

Strength lets you adjust the overall blending strength.

To apply a blend-map to a filter, to textures, to objects, and details, you need to set the Area for the specified layer:

Editing Blend-Maps

World Creators’ editing tools are very powerful and offer a quite comfortable way to create new blendmaps from scratch or to edit existing ones.

You can edit a blend-map by clicking on the Edit Blend-Map button. There are a couple of nice tools you can use to paint a blend-map on your own. If you have installed the Asset Library, then you also will find some brushes in here as well – or just create your own and import them into World Creator.

Blend-Map Edit Controls

Below you can see a quick overview of the current input layout of World Creators’ edit controls.:

Filter based Blend-Maps

Another way of creating a blend-map is by telling World Creator to use a Filter. This option can only be triggered if a filter has been applied on the terrain, else it is grayed out. If you click on Filter, you can select the filter which you would like World Creator to use as a blend-map.

This feature may also be used to create flow-maps, typically created by erosions. It shows the difference of the underlying terrain and applied filter changes – in case of erosion you will see the flow of an erosion. In case of another filter you will see the changes of the applied filter.

However, for creating high quality flow-maps, we suggest you use the Simulation Mode (we will cover that in a later chapter).

Working with Height-Maps

Areas can also be used to cover custom height-maps. These can be either imported through a file or created manually inside World Creators’ terrain paint tools.

To enable that feature you need to check the Has Heightmap option.

World Creator internally creates a 32-bit height-map and applies it automatically in real-time to the underlying terrain.

You then can import your own custom height-maps from file by clicking on File. With Save, you save the current Areas’ height-map to file. With Clear, you empty the height-map and Blur blurs the heightmap.

Operation lets you choose how the height-map is mixed with the underlying terrain.

Cut-Off Scaling lets you adjust the height-range into which the height-values are mapped.

If Blend-Map as Mask is enabled, the height-map is applied using the Areas’ blend-map. Hence, only locations defined by the blend-map are considered for height-map calculations.

The Border Blend Range behaves the same as for the blend-map (see Working with Blend-maps).

With Height-Offset, you offset the Areas’ height-map which lets you adjust the elevation of the terrain in general.

With Weight-Scale you can adjust overall blending of the height-map with respect to the underlying terrain surface.

With Use Level Step you tell World Creator, how accurate the height-map is affecting the underlying terrain. A large value will prevent World Creator to mix in its own procedural techniques. You can define the strength values per level if you uncheck the Use Level Step option. This will give you more control of the overall mixing behavior.

Editing Height-Maps

World Creator allows you to freely modify an Areas’ height-map with powerful terrain painting tools. Click on Edit Heightmap to make the terrain painting tools visible.

World Creators’ editing tools are very powerful and offer a quite comfortable way to create new height-maps from scratch or to edit existing ones which you might have imported.

Heightmap Edit Controls

Below you can see a quick overview of the current input layout of World Creators’ edit controls.: