5.Texturing

With the latest version of World Creator, new capabilities have been introduced which enable you to texture (colorize) your terrain according to a variety of criteria. Additionally, World Creator supports a wide range of state-of-the-art texturing techniques, as known by AAA games and movie productions.

Textures can be combined with each other and further grouped into layers. Layers can be restricted to Areas, used to mask a specific region on the terrain. The textures that belong to a specific layer that have an area set up, are applied only along the areas’ blend map (mask). Hence, you can use a combination of layers, textures and areas to create stunning, and, realistic looking textured surfaces.

All the required settings can be found inside the Textures tab:

Before looking at the texturing properties, it might help to first discover the available texturing features inside World Creator, that are:

▪ Height-Based

▪ Tri-Planar

▪ Perlin Normal Noise

▪ Eliminate Tiling

Those features can be enabled or disabled inside the General tab:

By default, Height Based Texturing is disabled. Hence, texturing uses simple blending operations to blend between two different textures:

With Height-Based enabled, the displacement maps are considered to sample the height values and use them to calculate the weight of a specific texture. The texture with the largest weight wins.

Height-based texturing gives you great and realistic results if viewed while on the ground. Viewed from far away it results in much harder edges – visually not very appealing. It also highly depends on the given displacement map – a worse map results in a very bad visual quality.

Tri-Planar Texturing

A more important technique is called Tri-Planar Texturing. By default, the Tri-Planar Texturing feature is enabled inside World Creator:

This is intended to reduce texture stretching that occurs on high slopes on non-regular meshes. Please be aware of, that this technique might create a heavy performance impact.

Perlin-Normal Noise

Another texturing feature that can be enabled is Perlin-Normal Noise. This technique is intended to reduce tiling artefacts like the ones shown in the image below:

With Perlin-Normal Noise enabled, World Creator additionally blends in a very special normal map which is created using Perlin Noise functionality. It might dramatically reduce tiling artifacts.

Eliminate Tiling

With this option enabled, World Creator uses most modern and quite complex calculations to fully eliminate tiling artifacts.

Creating Texture Layers

To apply a texture, you first must create a layer by clicking on Add Layer. You can add as many layers as you want – there are no restrictions in number. Remove All, removes all layers.

Layers can be enabled, disabled, re-arranged, and, removed.

Each layer has a Name, an Area and a list of Textures. Naming a layer might be of interest if you plan a large and complex terrain. An area is used to specify a specific region using a blend map (mask) which is used to apply the textures of this layer.

Adding Textures

Click on Add inside the selected layer, to open the Texture Library:

To add a texture, you either press Add or Add & Close. Add will just add the selected texture to the specified layer without closing the Texture Library. That way, you can keep on adding more and more textures. Add & Close will add the selected texture to the specified layer and close the Texture Library.

Click on a texture of your choice to add it to the texture list of the selected layer. The UI will change to the following:

Each texture can be enabled or disabled. The two re-arrange buttons are used to change the order (priority) of a selected texture (in order from left to right). World Creator uses a priority-based texturing technique which means that a texture with a higher priority (right) completely overlaps another texture with lower priority (left); so, textures that overlap due to their distribution settings are not blended together unless you explicitly want that. This leads to beautifully blended textures and perfect results.

With Duplicate, you can create a copy of the currently selected texture. Remove will delete the selected texture and Remove All removes all textures from the layers’ texture list.

Change lets you exchange the selected texture to another that you can choose from the Texture Library. It will not affect the current settings of the texture.

Texture Properties

Each added texture has its own specific properties which are used by World Creators’ texturing technique. Depending on the enabled texturing feature, some properties might be visible, some not.

Now that we know what kind of texturing features are available inside World Creator at time of writing this documentation, let’s have a close look at the available texture properties, that are:

Tagging

With Tag, you can tag your texture (e.g. give it an ID). It does not have any impact on texturing but might be of interest when importing World Creator projects into another application.

Operation

With Operation, you can tell World Creator how the selected texture should be combined with the other textures applied to the specified layer.

Tile Size

If Tile Size Locked is checked, the Tile Size X and Tile Size Z values will always be equal which is usually the default setting.

The Tile Size values determine the size of the tiles used during texture mapping. The larger those values, the larger the texture image being mapped is – relative to the terrain size. To quickly match the tile size to the terrain size, click the icon.

Tile Offset

If Tile Offset Locked is checked, the Tile Offset X and Tile Offset Z values will always be equal which is the default settings.

Tile Offset X and Tile Offset Z allows you to offset the so-called UV coordinates used by texturing techniques to read a sample from the texture. With that, you can offset the position.

Gradients

With Use Height Gradient and Use Weight Gradient enabled, you can create a gradient per texture along the height and selector weight of the terrain. The gradient tool behaves like all well-known gradient tools from other applications. To add a marker, click below the gradient-color field. To change the color of a marker, double-click the marker to open the color picker tool. To remove a marker, click on it using the right mouse button.

Additionally, you can import custom gradient textures, export a gradient to file, pick a gradient by loading a custom image and adjust the Strength of the overall gradient as well as if it should be auto aligned to the terrain automatically.

Shade

Shade lets you additionally shade the texture by a specific color.

Metallic

With Metallic, you control how metallic the texture surface should be.

Smoothness

With Smoothness, you control the micro surface detail or smoothness across a surface.

Brightness and Contrast

Brightness and Contrast gives you additional control about the visual appearance of the texture colors.

Height Scale

With Height Scale, you can control the height factor of the displacement map (height map) of the given texture, if you have Height-Based Texturing enabled as shown before.

Perlin Normal

With Perlin Normal, you can control the strength of the calculated noise values, if Perlin-Normal Noise Texturing is enabled as shown before.

Texture Distribution Properties

The texture distribution properties define at what specific locations the texture is applied. If an area is used, these properties only affect those locations that are covered by the blend map (mask) of the area. Else, the entire terrain is affected.

Most features will get only visible if you activate them, such as Cavity, Noise Select, Height Select (which further unfolds the Height Noise feature) and more.

Sediment Surface

Here you can link the texture to a specific sediment surface which is part of the Simulation Mode. Hence, you need to run a Simulation in order to see the changes. The Simulation Mode performs a real-time simulation of Erosion, Sedimentation, Rain, Rivers and more. Linking textures to Sediment Surfaces, will cause a nice mix depending on the above-mentioned simulation possibilities. More on that in another chapter.

Cavity

The Cavity is used to apply a texture either along the peaks (convexity) or along the carves (concavity). You can choose between Convex and Concave to list additional properties.

Steps indicates, how many pixels are considered for the whole calculation. With Step Size, you can set the distance at which to start the calculations. Strength indicates the strength at which the operation affects texture blending.

Below you can see how the Cavity affects the distribution of a single texture, depending on the terrain surface:

Flow Enabled

Flow Enabled let’s you enable the flow-map settings for the specified textures. With that, the specified texture is applied along the real-time generated flow-map which is used to visualize water flow on the terrain.

Flow maps drastically enhance the texturing of your terrain, creating an ultra-realistic coloring. The flow-map can further be adjusted under Textures / General. We recommend reading the in-app documentation for the specified settings.

Roughness

The Roughness is used to apply a texture depending on the surface roughness.

Follow Sun Direction

Follow Sun Direction will let you to texture your terrain depending on the sun light direction. With Invert, the texture is only applied on the shadowed parts of the terrain. Additionally, you can use the Smoothness to further adjust the blending between non-shadowed parts and shadowed parts.

Noise Select

The Noise Select is used to randomly apply a texture across the terrain surface, simulating a more natural look and feel.

Below you can see how Noise Select can be used to improve terrain texturing:

Height Select

With Height Select enabled you can specify the height range, in which the texture is applied to. Use the Height Smoothness value to smoothly blend the height range. To prevent the height range value from forming a noticeable and visually unappealing border, you also have the option of assigning a Height Noise.

The Height Noise can be used to create irregular and more natural looking transitions:

With Relative to Ocean enabled, the Height Range value becomes a relative value depending on the currently set ocean level (which can be set in Scene / Ocean). That means, that each time you change the ocean level, the height range will automatically adapt its value. Hence, this is great if you are about creating e.g. a beach.

In the above two images, the sand textures’ height range was set to Relative to Ocean. By changing the ocean level, the sand texture adapts its location automatically.

Slope Select

With Slope Select you can specify the angle range (Slope Range in degrees) in which the texture is applied to. The angle transitions can also be stretched and blended with the Slope Smoothness value.

Angle Select

With Angle Select you can specify the angle (Angle in degrees) in which the texture is applied to.

Weight

The Weight defines how strongly the texture is blended. This value is especially important if multiple textures overlap due their settings.