FMP: World Machine

I decided to approach terrain differently this time and use World Machine to create a terrain layout and then generate various maps out of it. I found a series of tutorials on You Tube, each of them over 1h long. Hopefully it'll be worth the time. I am past the process of building the terrain itself.

I will get a height map, diffuse, cavity, AO and 3 masks for 3 colour variations used in the scene (one for grass, rock and water).

The difficult part is when you have to fiddle with it to make it look even nicer. This requires sculpting the surface manually using Mudbox. I really don't like learning new programs in such a short amount of time but it's quite essential if I want to make my environment look good. Mudbox can automatically sculpt the surface based on imported height map.

It also allows you to preview real time AO, Cavity and Normal map (which in this case is kind of pointless but it surely will be useful for other projects).

Importing terrain into Cryengine didn't seem that easy at all. I had to make sure all the resolutions are correct etc.

I kept having this problem where my entire terrain would just go up in spikes. It turns out that I accidently exported flow map instead of height map.

I merged all maps I got from World Machine in Photoshop. I also baked an additional Ambient Occlusion in Xnormal.

So at the moment it's awfully bright and I still need to get rid of the checker pattern. But at least I managed to export and import it. Mission partially accomplished.