World Machine grants you these super powers:
Powerful Editor Features
Instant Previews
With the new 'Mt Rainier' edition, your edits build fluidly in the background. This is the fastest World Machine yet.
Graph Based Workflow
You should sculpt only if you want to! Using a graph based approach, you can create terrain by connecting together components that create and modify your terrain.
Check out how easy it is to build a terrain at up to 8k resolution in realtime!
Keep it organized
Graph-based approaches can sometimes get messy. World Machine helps you understand your graph:
- Groups & routing - declutter, label, and organize your devices
- Macros - powerful user-created devices that abstract an entire subgraph as a single device.
- Blueprints - easily add sets of devices you typically use together
Full edit history
The new 'Mt Rainier' version is built around undo/redo.
- Jump back in time to view and compare previous edits
- Preserve your entire editing history for a project (Professional Edition only)
Organize using groups
Hit tab to quick-add any component to the world
Create Fractal Terrains
Powerful Fractals
Terrains based on fractal noise are a mainstay of computer graphics... but all too often, they look too similar and are difficult to control.
World Machine's fractal generators allows you to create very unique terrain types and styles, ranging from realistic to incredibly stylized. Everything from typical noise-based terrains to extremely unique localspace fractals are possible!
Combine different fractal patterns in different areas of the terrain
A custom fractal, used to create streaky, directional terrain
Layouts
Layouts allow you to control your procedural terrain by specifying what and where.
You can sketch out continents, indicate where mountains or valleys should reside, or place roads and rivers into the terrain.
Sketch continents
Direct mountainsSimulate Nature
World-class Erosion Modelling
The natural world is not a perfect fractal. World Machine offers powerful natural effect tools to help create realistic terrain.
From Sea to Snowy Peak
Flow based erosion creates gullies and carries away entire mountains given enough time, while
Thermal erosion breaks apart cliff faces and accumulates talus slopes beneath them.
With Snow you can simulate the accumulation of snowfall on the terrain. Snow accumulates and buries your terrain under soft features.
Flow-based Erosion
Thermal Erosion
Accumulate and melt snowWater Systems
Rivers
World Machine lets you add water that has real elevation, gradients, and flow
The river tool allows you to sketch a river course and automatically apply geological features such as meanders, ripple-pool sequences, and realistic valley walls.
The water flow vectormap is automatically calculated from hydrodynamic principles. All of this (geometry and flowmap) can be easily exported with your terrain.
A Complete Water System
You can work with water in ways far beyond simply sketching rivers:
Use the powerful Flow Restructure tool to change any terrain to make water flow correctly to sealevel. Valleys are raised, ridges cleaved, and small depressioned removed.
Create Water automatically adds river networks, and forms lakes where geologically appropriate. You can also flow water semi-automatically with an easy "click to flow" mechanism.
Coastal Erosion quickly creates beaches, shapes the near-shore area, and creates an ocean of water.
River Canyon
Flow Restructure
Create Water
Coastal ErosionMaterial Texturing
Physically Based Rendering
World Machine supports the popular PBR standards, so you can bring in your existing library of PBR materials to texture your world. Or create entirely new materials custom within World Machine.
PBR materials support standard diffuse, normal, height, roughness, metalness, and AO channels.
Wet reflections
Viewport controls
Imported material
Advanced selection tools
Texture maps for terrains are traditionally created by using a combination of elevation and slope restrictions to govern what texture goes where.
World Machine gives you a richer set of masking tools called Selectors to orchestrate your materials:
- Basic : Elevation, Slope
- Advanced : Roughness, Wetness, Water, Surface Convexity
- Natural filter outputs: All of the natural filters create helpful texturing masks, such as sedimentation masks, snow masks, and much more.
It's time to move beyond height and slope based texture distribution.
You can create and export your terrain texturing in several ways, depending on your desired workflow:
Weightmaps
Texture weightmaps (also known as splat-maps) are a set of one or more RGBA bitmaps whose channels act as weights controlling the distribution of materials at any given location in the world.
All selectors and erosion masks can be combined as you see fit to create your weightmaps. The Weightmap device will make sure your map channels are always normalized and coverage adjusted to your preference.
Unique World Texture
Modern projects often avoid the repetition of tiled textures and create a unique high resolution material for every point in your world (sometimes called Virtual Texturing or Megatexturing).
World Machine's high-resolution output abilties lets you create these unique textures down to the sub-meter level. This works particularily well with tiled export in the Professional Edition.
Export to your favorite Tool
When you're done editing in World Machine, just hit the 'Export All' button, and your assets will be generated and exported.
The terrain geometry can be output as a heightfield or mesh for your target application of choice.
A wide variety of bitmap formats are supported to export your mask and material data.
GLTF Full Scene Export
New to 'Artist Point' and beyond, you can now easily package and export your entire terrain as one scene with glTF. This makes it easy to view, share, and import elsewhere.
GLTF is a rising standard supported by many applications, and there are many convenient browser-based viewers.
Tiled Terrains
If you're creating a massive open world, a single asset to describe the region is no longer suitable.
With the Professional Edition and above, you can export a set of tiles covering your region. Each tile is built seperately, allowing for both extreme detail and a nearly unbounded world size.
Standard Industry File Formats
Whether you're creating terrain for a game, feature film, or a visualization you can export your art assets from World Machine.
- Full scene export via GLTF
- Geometry export via heightfield or triangle mesh OBJ files.
- Export color, elevation, or mask data via popular formats like PNG, TIFF or OpenEXR
World Machine is compatible with game engines such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Amazon Lumberyard, Crysis Engine, and many others.
And of course, World Machine also exports for all your favorite 3D rendering package such as Blender, Maya or Cinema4D.
Try it out!
The Basic Edition of World Machine is free for personal, noncommercial use.
Or purchase a license to unlock additional features
Download Basic Edition Purchase Now!