A way to get procedural terrain into your world.

Some more info here:
http://potato-ballad-sims.tumblr.co...l-on-how-to-get

Alternative download link here.

Thanks for posting this! Been playing around with World Machine and CAW and it was good to see someone else's approach. The interesting thing about world machine is how people's workflows can be so different. I haven't been using Basic Coverage like this tutorial does (though am going to give it a try now). I've been using selectors and then blurring/curves in Photoshop (I'm getting much better quality results with those filters in PS than in WM). Getting the initial texture maps are fairly straightforward, but it gets a more complicated as I tweak them (see screenshot). Still a lot faster for painting terrain for someone artistically impaired like me.

I also think this is an opportunity to 'simulate' distant terrain without having to make a custom object. I attached files of an early draft of a world. (All the textures you see are procedural, nothing handpainted yet). It's a large world, but functionally a small one. Since it would only be playable in the valley area, the rest of the map is free for creating a functional distant terrain. Obviously you don't need world machine to do this, but since the distant landscape, well, distant, it may be much faster as you likely don't need to touch things up with much painting by hand.

- I found Rhodalle's youtube tutorials. They're conversational and give a nice overview. I hope she finishes the series.
- I like the geekatplay for an intro of world machine through more advanced techniques
- There are a number of other youtube videos on world machine as well. Interestingly, it seems the workflow to get terrain into CAW is more straightforward than a lot of other games.
- Posts/ideas in the world machine forums

A sidenote, one thing that does bug me is the appearance of these ugly circle textures (see screenshot). I think it might have to do with the falloff in the selectors in WM and/or blurring in PS. I would be indebted to anyone who knows how to avoid them!

Resource I found for real world height maps. Originally made for Cities Skylines.
Advice I read was to use the merged map. Working quite well so far. Not all the world has good data, but the US and western europe are well covered.

http://terrain.party/

I used terrain party to make terrains for cities skylines. I thought it was taken down. I could click the link I guess.

It seems to be up again. Goodie. Is the world machine anything like it? It was very easy getting those terrain maps into cs, but it had to be smoothed out in map editor. I guess that could be done in photoshop, but it's going to be a process.

I had to stop one of my world because of dt troubles, I guess this is an approach I could test.

Probably too rough to import straight into CAW. I wanted height maps to use to shape the noise in World Machine.

Here's an example (in world machine) of a terrain party heightmap straight after import. It's a nice shape, but jagged. The next is after blurring the peaks and applying erosion.

Edited to add: Off topic, but I wanted to demonstrate this. The third screenshot is a grid overlaying the eroded map. I tweaked The Grid 2 macro to dimensions for CAW large maps. So large squares are chunks, small squares are the size of 64x64 plots.