World Machine Updated

The World Machine team has introduced Build 3021 which focuses on improving workflows in a variety of ways.

The World Machine team has introduced Build 3021 which focuses on improving workflows in a variety of ways. Let’s take a look at the new possibilities.

EXR, JPEG Support

This one is simple but long awaited.

JPEG is now supported as a format for input and output. Even though JPEG is a lossy format, it is nonetheless a fairly common one for texture assets, reference maps, etc so it’s very useful to be able to read or write it.

OpenEXR is a different beast altogether. Besides being a long-overdue format, there are a ton of useful features that WM does not yet use, including the ability to potentially put many channels/layers into a single file. If there’s demand, the ability to do this could be added.

Perhaps more importantly, OpenEXR is an HDR format. Right now, WM just clips out of band values to 0..1. In a future release, WM will support PBR workflows and HDR color values, and this will come into its own…

Output Manager and Templates

The Output Manager has been dramatically improved to be more useful:

There are a few things happening above:

The new Output Manager dialog is easy to use and shows every file path that will be exported
Filenames can now use template substitutions within Outputs. The filename for each device is being dynamically created from the device name and the world resolution.
Any part of the template path that doesn’t exist will be created. In this example, a "Assets" folder is created to place the".r16" file within.
Outputs within Macros work. You can see the “Unity Export” macro contains two outputs that are exposed to the Output Manager.

Viewport Navigation

A significant amount of work went into making navigation more consistent and easier in all of the various windows in WM.

For the most part, you can continue using World Machine views the same way as you have before — the additional navigation methods are supplementary.

3D View

The new Track command makes it easy to examine areas closely

Orbit and Free-look modes now work together as you’d expect. Previously you more or less had to use one or the other as they interpreted the camera differently.
The Middle Mouse button now tracks (pans) the terrain. When viewing from the side, this allows you to raise or lower the Z value of the orbit point, something that wasn’t possible before and was sorely needed.
The Right Mouse button zooms as before. However, if you zoom into the orbit point, it pushes the orbit point forward, allowing you to naturally explore the terrain this way.
Ctrl and Shift are now global modifiers that speed up / slow down the rate of each action.
All of these conventions are basically Maya-style navigation. ALT is not required however

I think you’ll find its easier than ever to just navigate and not have the camera controls get in the way.

Layout View

Layout View navigation has been changed to make it consistent with the 3D view. There is a long-term plan to merge these two views together and let all layout actions happen in the 3D View, so this is an important first step to make that comfortable.

In particular:

Left and right click-dragging still pan the terrain.
The Middle mouse button now also pans the terrain.
ALT + RMB now zooms the same as the 3D View
ALT + LMB rotates the view

Device Workview

You got it — the Device workview now also follows the same convention as above (except with no rotation possible).

A few other details were ironed out, including the different roles for CTRL and SHIFT and adding a preference option for preferring to pan or box-select on left-drag — see the change list for details.

Slope Selector

The Slope Selector has always been a little weird. Many a person has been confused by what exactly the units represent. That’s because, in a decision dating back to the very beginning of World Machine, they were “normalized slope units” — basically a number that represented a slope between 0 and the maximum that could be expressed based on the project settings.

However, that’s useful to approximately no one. So the Slope Selector has been changed to work directly in degrees.

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Direct enter in degrees!

You can now also directly enter the numeric values into the boxes. Huzzah! You may also find that the resulting mask is subtly different from before — this mostly doesn’t matter, but this change is versioned because of this.

Little Things

There are lots of little things I really enjoy personally, such as being able to Copy-Paste (ctrl-shift-V) settings into already existing devices, along with a subtle indicator to let you know if the operation succeeded or failed.

Or finally fixing a couple bugs, like Undo sometimes seemingly not responding, or devices not being rebuilt inside of macros if they weren’t connected to an output…

You can find the full breakdown here.