Jimco Software Reviews - WorldBuilder Professional 4.1 (continued)
Not only can WorldBuilder create realistic plants, but it can also render verdant plants, a plant system developed by Digital Element that grows incredibly life-like plants. Verdant plants can be animated easily and produce excellent output. Just look at this example which shows a video of a verdant tree in a moderate breeze. This animation is a good example of the quality of output you can expect from WorldBuilder's animation engine with almost no effort.
In all my years of using other landscape creation applications, I have never been able to attain this level of realism. 
Another really cool feature in WorldBuilder is Areas. Areas allow you to define an area on a landscape to which you can apply a texture, add vegetation, add stones, etc. By using Areas in this way, you can easily create scenes that would be painstaking or impossible in other applications. In figure 15, I have used three different areas to control materials and plants in my scene. The path was created by applying a different material to a path-shaped area. The trees bordering the path on both sides were scattered in two areas, one on each boundary of the path area.
Figure 15 - A dirt path created in WorldBuilder.
Pay particular attention to the materials that were applied in this scene. Notice the texture of the ground under the pine trees. This effect of grass growing in an area littered with pine needles was created using a few layered materials. By layering the materials and then adding some grass to the ground, I was able to create a ground texture that is incredibly realistic. In all my years of using other landscape creation applications, I have never been able to attain this level of realism.
Creating the same framework in another application would take many hours of work, assuming you could do it at all with these kinds of results. The time that you save with WorldBuilder directly translates to giving you more time to add the finishing touches that make the difference between a scene that looks computer-generated and one that looks real. Figure 15 is just the beginning of a completed scene. You can be assured that I'll be playing around with it for weeks to come, not only because I want it as realistic as possible, but also because WorldBuilder is wonderfully fun to use.
Rendering
The scene in figure 15 took a little over 10 minutes to render on my laptop. (More details on WorldBuilder performance later in this review.) As you're creating a scene such as this, it's not uncommon to render the scene hundreds of times to see what effect different changes make to the scene. Many applications implement a function that allows you to render a specific area of a scene by drawing a box around that area. WorldBuilder does not offer this functionality. Instead, WorldBuilder has a unique feature called Incremental Design.
Incremental Design allows you to render a scene and then save that render in a z-buffer image. You can then render only changes made to the scene instead of the entire scene. (An incremental render of the scene in figure 15 took less than 15 seconds.) I find this feature to be a much better implementation than area rendering because it allows you to see how a change affects the entire scene. Rendering a small area of a scene is often insufficient to determine if a change is what you're after. By using the Incrementail Design feature in WorldBuilder, you can quite quickly see how small changes affect your entire scene. Once again, WorldBuilder has provided a unique feature that makes experimentation fast and fun, and experimentation is the key to creating realistic landscapes.
The quality of renders in WorldBuilder is top-shelf. Look at the quality of the shadow maps and lighting nuances in figure 15. These are details that you probably won't pinpoint without being directed to them, but your mind subconciously sees these things. If lighting and shadows are not exactly right, your brain will not accept the image as being real.
WorldBuilder offers a large selection of post-processing filters that you can take advantage of to add realism to your scenes. These include haze, fog, depth of field, etc.. Figure 16 gives you a better idea of the filters available to you in WorldBuilder.
Figure 16 - Many filters are available in WorldBuilder.
Rendering speed in WorldBuilder is impressive. In fact, WorldBuilder renders much faster than any 3D application I've ever used. 3D landscape applications are notoriously slow in rendering because the polygon count and lighting calculations required to render a natural scene are enormous. WorldBuilder seems to have worked around this problem. If you are on a multi-processor machine (or one with hyper-threading), WorldBuilder will take advantage of that and will render multiple portions of a scene simultaneously.
If you want to really speed up rendering on large scenes, WorldBuilder supports network rendering. (Professional version only.) Using this method requires you to install WorldBuilder on the computers that will take part in the rendering. WorldBuilder is then started in a special network mode on each computer so that each computer can take part in the rendering process. A detailed tutorial is available on the WorldBuilder Web site.