Overview
Materials are used to color the terrain. World Creator supports a wide range of different material types enabling you to create fantastic results inside and outside of World Creator.
The way you add, remove, rearrange, rename, group, and delete materials is exactly the same as you do with filters. Please check this article if you haven't already because we are not going to cover it in this article.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Color Material
This type of material simply applies a single color value to the terrain. You may use distributions and effects to maks where the color should apply on the terrain. The basic color settings look as the image shows below.
Tint let's you choose a color from the palette. You may either adjust the Satturation (S) and Brightness (B) values of the color or simply add the hexadecimal representation or the RGB value of a color. You may also choose a color on your desktop or any application running on your computer. To do so, hover with your mouse cursor over a color you like and hit the SPACE key on your keyboard. You will then see in the large color field that the color is set.
In the above color storage section you can easily save the set color for the current project by right-clicking on any of the fields. To choose a color from the above storage section, left-clik on any of the fields.
Metalness and Roughness let's you adjust the reflectivity and the overall look of the terrain.
 |  |
With Use Shape Layer Color you can tell World Creator to apply the image that is used by MapTiler and by the Stamp Layers on top of everything.
Gradient Material
This kind of material is one of the most complex but also one of the most powerful materials you can use inside World Creator. It allows you to map and blend a gradient depending on the applied distributions. A distribution basically creates a blending mask that is used to color specific parts of the terrain. The gradient is using that blending mask to map its colors based on the mask blend values (weights).
The general rule for the gradient mapping is as follows:
Gradient colors from left to right, map values from min to max
Have a look at the image below. It shows a rainbow gradient using a Height Distribution that range from 67.3 m to 100.8 m using smooth values of 10 into both directions (up and down).
As you can see, values that are outside of the Height Range value, are mapped to the most left part of the gradient. The values that are within the Smoothing area (up and down with value 10) are mapped are mapped to the middle part, and the valuse that fully match the Height Range, are mapped to the most right part of the gradient. This same logic applies to any other Distribution as well and gives an unlimited range of color possibilities. We highly suggest you to master the gradient material as this is the best possible way for creatin stunning and real looking materials for your terrain (also in combination with textures and Adobe Substance materials).
Pick let's you pick colors from your desktop or any other applcation (just follow the instructions when you click on Pick). Import lets you import a gradient from file. Export let's you save the gradient to file, and Delete clears the gradient (blank white).
We have created some gradient presets which can selected through the Gradient Type drop down box (which is declared as deprecated - we will remove this as World Creator now supports material presets in general). In order to apply a gradient based on your own distribution rules you must select Custom through the Gradient Type drop down box.
Invert Gradient let's you invert the entire gradient mapping.
Substance Materials
Adobe Substance Materials are procedural texture materials and offer amazing possibilities to procedurally enhance texturing inside World Creator. The image below for example show some rocks and moss along with water areas - everything packed into one single Adobe Substance Material.
Depending on the Adobe Substance Material you import, you will see different settings which you may adjust as you wish to create a specific result. Just as any material in World Creator, you may use Distributions and Effects to mask out those parts of the terrain you want to apply Adobe Substance Materials to.
Beside the internal settings of each Adobe Substance Material, there are some parameters that all Adobe Substance Materials have in common inside World Creator.
Let's take a closer look of what each of the above parameters are doing:
- Is Gloss
Let's you choose whether the texture has a gloss channel - Normal Strength
Let's you adjust the strength of the normals (affects visual depth due to lighting) - Flip Normal Y
Let's you flip the normals Y channel - Tile Size
Let's you adjust texture tiling - Tile Offset X / Y
Let's you offset the texture on the terrain along the X and Y axis (texture space) - Triplanar Projection
This is a World Creator specific texturing effect that prevents texture stretching. This effect cannot be exported as a color map or splat map. In order to use it in another application, you need to implement Triplanar Projection / Texturing as a material in the other application. - Stochastic Distribution
This is World Creator specific texturing effect that prevents texture tiles to repeat uniformly. This effect cannot be exported as a color map or splat map. In order to use it in another application, you need to implement Stochastic Distributions as a material in the other application.
Texture Material
The Texture Material allows you to import your own custom material to be rendered on your terrain. It provides a set of tools to customise the material to your scene, with some simple options to manipulate colour, normal and roughness, as well as placement on the terrain, and more advanced features such as triplanar projection or stochastic distribution to break up repeating patterns.
