Rocking the Digital Landscape World
World Creator 3 is poised to revolutionize the digital terrain building market later this year.
Stefan Kraus, CEO of German software developer BitetheBytes, answered a few of our questions about the latest version of his company’s fantastic terrain and landscape generating tool World Creator, which is used by major studios such as Bioware, Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Cinesite, Hybride, Warner Bros. Games and Unity. Here is what we found out:
Can you tell us a little bit about the development history of World Creator?
The very first version of World Creator had a different name: Geo Control and was developed by Johannes Rosenberg. Sadly, after he had a stroke, the product’s development came to a halt for around two years. He contacted us and wanted us to use his code-base to further develop Geo Control. We wanted to help him out and honestly, we liked his product and saw a lot of potential in it. To bring it back to life, we had to create a new brand. So in 2012, we changed the name to World Creator and fixed all open bugs and made it much more stable—that was in 2012.
We then decided to re-develop it entirely from scratch, and that’s how World Creator for Unity was born. Initially it was a prototype to prove, that terrain and landscape generation can be done well on the GPU—in 2015 we made a product out of it for the Unity Engine. But the main and long-term goal was a standalone application which can be utilized not only by Unity users. So after the Unity plugin, we started the development of World Creator 2 in 2016 and released an awesome terrain and landscape generator in early 2018. World Creator 2 was a game changer due to its real-time generation capabilities. Now, two years later, World Creator 3 will be released by the end of 2020 bringing terrain and landscape generation again to the the next level with new outstanding and breath-taking features.
What are some of the improvements and added features we can look forward to in Version 3, which will be available later this year? Honestly, there is a lot! I personally look forward to our new erosion and sediment system. Quality has improved drastically and the best about all this is, that we were also able to improve the performance. World Creator 2 is still the fastest generator but World Creator 3 is about 2.5 times faster than the previous version. The reason is that we developed our own engine specialized on terrain and landscape creation performed on the GPU—so just like in World Creator 2, everything in World Creator 3 will be real-time. In addition, we added a new workflow for creating landscapes; this time, using biomes. So with version 3 you will be able to setup different biomes allowing you to define real-world situations.
A biome can be anything—think of a desert biome including an oasis with a lake, nice vegetation, sand dunes and some rocks … or a forest containing different tree species with different textures underneath, flowers and grass surrounding the trees with different textures as well, and so on. It is a fully flexible hierarchical system, and you can save your biomes as templates and share it with others. Artists will be able to create their own biome settings and share it with others that can import them into their own projects. We have a real-time path-tracer that creates photo-real renders instantly, new design and sculpting tools that allow you to create exactly the terrain you want, a new powerful and ultra-flexible UI system, fully customizable export options allowing you to adapt the export settings to your own workflow.
Also, the long-awaited support for Wacom tablets will be available. One of the most powerful extensions in World Creator 3 will be the new hierarchy based distribution system allowing artists to combine many different distributions such as flow, several noise patterns, and post-processing techniques such as blur, and a lot more. World Creator 3 also has a tile based creation system—there are no limits in terrain size and resolution anymore. This also applies to textures, colors and even distribution rules. World Creator 3 will ship with tons of filters, distribution rules, and ready-to-use biomes for your productions. It will be an amazing package.
We also never had a clue about how many fantastic artists are out there—from hobbyists to professionals; I personally think that they most like is the real-time instantly get what they want with World Creator: Everyone can design a terrain shape without having to wait multiple minutes or hours for a single iteration – with World Creator they get it instantly. This allows them to be way more creative and
yes, it also makes a lot of fun to see all changes instantly. It’s like an ultimate playground, a perfect mix of design by hand and procedural content creation. of large terrain and landscapes for real-time applications in general. It all started with a new algorithm to render vast areas, planets or even entire galaxies. We soon figured out that not only the visualization is a problem, but also the generation of so much data is more vial to artist. So, we shifted to
What is your take on the state of digital arts and visual effects in 2020?