Jimco Software Reviews - WorldBuilder Professional 4.1 (continued)
Building Your World
You'll want to start out your WorldBuilder scene with a landscape object. Most 3D scenery applications create a default terrain that looks like a mountain with spikes on it. WorldBuilder's default landscape is a perfectly flat terrain. In WorldBuilder, you create terrains with skeleton lines. The concept is quite simple. A skeleton line is a line that can deform a landscape. Essentially, you draw one or more skeleton lines, raise part of the line above the surface of your landscape, and then WorldBuilder builds a "skin" that draps over the lines you've drawn. Figure 2 through figure 4 demonstrates how this works.
Figure 2 - A Skeleton Line
Figure 3 - The Raised Skeleton Line (Front View)
Figure 4 - The Skinned Landscape Rendered with No Texture
WorldBuilder comes with a large selection of skeleton lines in the Library so that you can add mountains and hills to your landscape without having to create them yourself.
Note: WorldBuilder also lets you create, edit, and import landscapes that are modeled using grayscale elevation maps. You can also download Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) from the Internet and use those for your landscapes.
Skeleton lines need not be created in a straight line. By drawing skeleton lines in a circular shape, you can create uniquely shaped mountains. By drawing an skeleton line inside another enclosed skeleton line and then lower the altitude of the inner skeleton line, you can easily create a pond or lake. Figure 5 shows the skeleton lines that I've drawn to create a lake. Figure 6 shows the rendered lake.
Figure 5 - Skeleton Lines for a Lake
Figure 6 - The Lake Rendered and Ready for Water
This scene provides a good baseline for demonstrating many of the great features in WorldBuilder. To begin with, you'll notice that the banks of my lake are sharply defined. That is easily resolved using a smooting modifier on my landscape. I've done that in figure 7.
Figure 7 - Smoothing Applied to a Landscape
You can change any setting just to see what it does without any fear that what you've done can't be undone.
Notice that I've applied too much smoothing. To fix that, all I need to do is modify the smoothing parameters in the property page that is displayed in figure 8 to the right. Smooting in Areas, the modifier I've applied, has a simple property page. Other properties have more complex property pages with many different settings that you can experiment with.
If I want to adjust the amount of smoothing on my landscape, all I have to do is select Smoothing in Areas (1) in the Property Tree (it has already been selected in figure 8) and then adjust the Averaging Radius in the property page. The new setting takes place automatically and I can see realtime feedback in the OpenGL rendering that WorldBuilder provides.
In this case, I have recognized that I've applied too much smoothing right away. You might be thinking that I should just undo the last action to restore my landscape. In most applications, that's the way it works. If you apply too much of a particular effect as I have here, you simply undo that and then reapply the effect at a lower setting. I could have done that here, but it would have required additional steps.
Here's another point. What if I hadn't realized that I had applied too much smoothing until after I had already made a hundred other changes to my scene? In other applications, I'd be out of luck. In WorldBuilder, you can change the setting (or remove it completely) at any time. Additionally, you can temporarily disable it and then re-enable it at the click of a button.
When I say that WorldBuilder is designed for experimentation, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You can change any setting just to see what it does without any fear that what you've done can't be undone.