Overview
This article presents an overview of the different options and variants that you can use in World Creator to export your terrain. It also includes a quick example of how to load terrain in a third-party DCC tool.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Overview
- The Export Preset System
- Export Map Types
- File Formats and Their Appropriate Uses
- Selecting the appropriate Bit Depth
- Importing a terrain in Cinema 4D
The Export Preset System
The export system of World Creators is based on export presets. Export maps for your renderer/engine of choice can be bundled into a single preset.
For example, when rendering terrain in Blender, the required map formats/types can be matched perfectly using a custom export preset. The preset may include heightmap, colormap, normal map, and potentially splat maps if there's a need for adjusting materials in Blender or a mesh when you don't want a displaced plane.
After configuring the export preset, it can be saved in the Presets section's Export folder. This feature enables you to easily reuse your preconfigured export preset in any upcoming project.
Export Map Types
Height Map
The heightmap is the main output you want from World Creator. It stores all height data in the most efficient memory format. Ensure you use a bit depth greater than 8-bit when exporting for a close-up terrain. Refer to the section Choosing the Right Bit Depth to understand why this is necessary.
You can deactivate Auto Normalization in the parameters. This allows you to set minimum and maximum values of the heightmap to customized values. By default, these values are automatically set according to the lowest and highest points of the terrain.
Splat Map
The splat map contains all your splat layer information. By default, World Creator tries to group up to four splat layers, depending on your selected texture format, into a single texture. They are then layered in the following order, into individual texture channels: red, green, blue, alpha
In some formats, you can choose to either deactivate the 'Use Alpha Channel' option, which restricts World Creator to only pack up to 3 channels in each texture, or activate the 'Single Channel' option, telling World Creator to create one texture per splat layer.
Color Map
The color map stores the colors of your terrain. It results from blending all the splat layers into one texture.
The color map enables you to deactivate Include TextureData. Disabling this will exclude all textured materials from the resulting colormap and replace them with their tint color. This feature enables you to reproduce material blending in your preferred DCC application and achieve the highest quality texture tiling.
Normal Map
A traditional normal map of the terrain. There are several orientation options available for rendering in different renderers. Additionally, you can choose to Include TextureData. If this is disabled, materials that utilize textures will not be included in the resulting normal map. This option enables you to replicate the material blending in your preferred rendering application and obtain texture tiling of the highest quality.
Mesh
In World Creator, you can export your terrain as a mesh. At the bottom of the mesh export settings, you will find options for the parameters that you want to include in your mesh.
Please note that a mesh is not currently the most memory-efficient method for transferring your terrain into another application because a mesh requires considerably more data per height point than a 2D height map.
For example, a terrain of 1024x1024 pixels as a height map only consumes 2 MB of memory, while a mesh for the same terrain requires a total of 56 MB.
Roughness Map
A roughness map stores data for Physically Based Rendering (PBR). You can disable the Include TextureData in the roughness map. Disabling the inclusion of texture data will exclude any material that uses textures from the resulting roughness map. This enables you to recreate the blending of materials in your preferred rendering application, thereby achieving the highest quality texture tiling.
Metalness Map
A map that contains data for physically-based rendering of metallic surfaces. This map allows you to exclude texture data by disabling 'Include TextureData'. Disabling this option will exclude all textured materials from the resulting metalness map. This enables you to recreate the material blending in your preferred rendering application for optimal texture tiling and quality.
Octane Package
With World Creator, you can directly export your terrain with all materials for rendering in Octane. The resulting .orbx file can either be opened in OctaneRender as a standalone application or imported by using an Octane plugin in another application.
File Formats and Their Appropriate Uses
Please note that the file formats and their settings may differ from those found online since World Creator only provides options that are relevant to terrains.
Format | Bit Depth | Channels | Recommended use cases |
Raw | 16bit, 32bit | up to 4 | heightmaps |
Tiff | 8bit, 16bit, 32bit | up to 4 | heightmaps, colormaps, splat maps |
Png | 8bit, 16bit | up to 4 | heightmaps, colormaps, splat maps |
Exr | 16bit, 32bit | up to 4 | heightmaps |
Jpeg | 8bit | 3 | colormaps, splat maps |
Tga | 8bit | up to 4 | colormaps, splat maps |
Bmp | 8bit | 3 | colormaps, splat maps |
Selecting the appropriate Bit Depth
When working with height data, it is crucial to choose a higher bit depth. This is because of the variation of available values per pixel. The bit depth determines the number of possible values a pixel can take between 0 and 1 (in our case, we will use a 0-1 range; however, 32-bit images can go beyond the 0-1 range).
These are the number of steps for each bit depth:
- 8bit: 28 = 256
- 16bit: 216 = 65536
- 32bit: 232 = 4294967296
This already indicates that there could be a potential problem. Since an 8-bit image has a limited 256 values per pixel, the number of possible levels of elevation between the lowest and highest point of the exported terrain is limited, resulting in visible steps in the exported terrain.
The below three images demonstrate this issue where the 8-bit image shows significant artifacts in the terrain. However, there is no significant differentiation between the 16-bit and 32-bit versions. Thus, it is advisable to export the heightmap usually with a bit depth of at least 16 bits. If there are any visual stepping issues found in the 16-bit map, it should be increased to 32 bits.
 8bit heightmap |  16bit heightmap |  32bit heightmap |
Importing a terrain in Cinema 4D
This section covers a fundamental import/export process to another application. Cinema 4D and the SandyCanyon sample are used, although the process can apply to other projects and applications.
Exporting from World Creator
First, add a new export preset to the scene, and then add a color map to the preset.
Color Map export
The format for the color map is set to jpg as it is the most compact. Compression issues, if any, are not expected to be visible since it is only the colormap.
Next, add a height map to the preset. Set the format to Tiff and change the Bit Depth format to Int 16. It is better to use the Raw format, if possible, but the Cinema 4D modifier we want to use does not support .raw files. The .tiff file is expected to hold our data just as well.
Height Map export
Select the Export Preset and click Export. The export folder should now contain the color and height map.
To open the export folder, press the Export Folder button in the toolbar.
Importing into Cinema 4D
First, add a plane in Cinema 4D. Adjust the plane's size to match the size of our terrain in World Creator, which in this case is 1024x1024. In addition, increase the plane's segments to achieve a better displacement result in the future.
Next, add a Subdivision Surface and place the plane beneath it. Change the Subdivision type to 'ObenSubdiv Catmull-Clark' and set the Boundary Interpolation to Edge and Border, to prevent the corners of our plane from being rounded during the subdivision process. This approach prevents the corners of our plane from being rounded during the subdivision process. The Subdivision Viewport and Render properties are now the controls to adjust the terrain resolution in the editor and during rendering.
 Base plane |  Subdivision modifier |
To now insert our terrain add a Displace modifier below the plane and reference the exported heightmap in it. Since Cinema 4D doesn't know our custom height range by default we have to calculate and input it ourselves. Therefore take the min/max of the terrain (which can be found in the bottom left in World Creator) and calculate the difference. In our case, with a min height of 154 and a max height of 256, this leaves us with a height of 102. Insert this value into the Displace modifier's height and change the Type property to Intensity.
 Displace modifier |  Setting the correct height |
The final step for a finished terrain is to load our color data into Cinema. We're using Octane here for rendering, but the steps should apply to any other renderer.
Simply create a material, load the exported colormap into its color channel and apply the material to our displaced plane.
Alternatively, you can see a material setup that uses splat map blending and shader-based texture displacement instead of the Displace modifier approach described above. The whole setup has been achieved with the World Creator Bridge for Cinema 4D but the shader setup is also universally applicable for standard exported splatmaps from World Creator.
 Material setup |  Alternative splat map setup |  Final render |