World Creator is an industry standard software for creating real-time 3D terrain and landscape.
Based on GPU processing, check out the exclusive interview World Creator.
Please let us in detail, what is World Creator and workflow of it.
World Creator is a fully GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) powered 3D terrain and landscape generator which also has powerful editing and sculpting capabilities. It can be used to create terrains and landscapes fully procedural, or by design or combining both – and all that in real-time, even for ultra-high-resolution terrains (e.g. 16k by 16k) – changes will be adapted instantly. Speed, quality, and a highly optimized workflow are the key factors of World Creator. CPU based generators typically utilize a few cores letting you wait up to hours or even days for a single generation process. World Creator performs such operations within milli-seconds and with each new generation of graphics cards, it gets faster and faster for realistic 3D rendering output.
It is simply more intuitive to see results instantly because you have lots of room for experimentation, which means low-stakes creation that saves immense amounts of money and time.
Also, the tools we included are simple and intuitive, and there are a lot of them available. World Creator also works perfect with other applications, such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Cinema4D, Quixel Mixer, Substance, and more. We have developed some bridge modules allowing you to quickly transfer a terrain over to another application and currently we are building more and more bridges to improve the workflow even more.
Why the company decided to venture into the very niche domain of creating 3D terrain and landscape?
Our background is based on terrain visualization and management.
In 2007 we invented a new terrain system called CLODDY (Continuous Level of Detail – DY). That system was able to visualize entire planets and solar systems in real-time using real-world data. It was a very powerful streaming technology eliminating all known issues that come along with CLOD systems. But it was before 10 years, that is too early for such a technology because nobody wanted to have such large scale terrains in their games or productions – today it is different for sure and we plan to have this system included in the next major World Creator version. Because of that background we wanted to extend our profession for terrains and that is how it came that we started development of World Creator – the main goal was to create a fully GPU powered rendering of terrain and landscape generator for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Can you please explain the differences between CPU vs GPU?
Without going too deep into technical aspects, let me simplify things a bit.
Nowadays GPUs allow you to perform complex calculations by hardware on the GPU directly. That was not possible a few years ago. Before that, the CPU was required to do that. A modern GPU has a few thousand cores which can be used to parallelize computations. So instead of having typically 4 CPU cores doing the calculations you have, for example 4500 cores on a Nvidia 2080 RTX Ti, which means results in no-time. Also, with each new GPU generation coming almost every new year, the performance is about 20% – 40% increasing but still affordable compared to new CPUs with just a very few additional cores. So said, applications that a GPU powered get a lot faster with each new GPU generation.
Another aspect is that in 3D applications, the CPU must communicate with the GPU – a lot of data needs to be transferred and read back and so on. Those operations do cost a lot of time. Having them only on the GPU side without too many transfers, makes the entire process a lot faster giving you lots of room for additional calculations.
However, the GPU driver plays a very important part when doing GPU based calculations. Very minor driver issues may cause heavy issues in the application – like the Butterfly Effect. So, it is very important to use the latest drivers.
How do you harness power of GPU in world creator software to create real time terrain and landscape?
Our algorithms are optimized for being processed on the GPU. The system is perfect for GPU based calculations – that is why it is runs so well on a GPU. We use Compute Shaders to perform the calculations and it just gets faster and faster with every new GPU generation.
Is World Creator needs optimized hardware configuration? What is production standard configuration?
World Creator is GPU dependent; hence, you should have a quite good GPU. We recommend having at least a 980 GTX or equivalent AMD GPU with 4 GB VRAM. For rendering, the CPU does not really matter at all, same for RAM. World Creator can be thought of like a AAA game where GPU, VRAM and GPU drivers do matter.
What is procedural workflow? How it is advantageous over other pipelines of Animation and VFX?
Procedural workflow means that you let the application do kind of work you would not love to do by hand because it just takes way too long. This is something that a computer can do way faster. On the other end you can design and sculpt things exactly the way you want. The genius part is to combine both approaches, procedural and by design. That way you can simply use your design skills to create exactly what you want and enhance additionally using procedural techniques. So the combination is the key – the better the workflow, the better the experience and the better the results.
Why a production house should buy World Creator software to create 3D terrain and landscape?
Because it is giving you fantastic results, from stylized to ultra-realistic terrains, and is faster than any other terrain creation toolkit available.
World Creator saves a huge amount of time and with that, a lot of money. Due to the highly optimized workflow, the learning curve is extremely low – you simply do not have to dig documentation repeatedly or watch tons of videos to achieve something outstanding and realistic.
How many other 3D software’s are supported? Please explain their integration / production pipeline.
World Creator is a content creation tool. So said, you export a height-map in well known formats that other 2D and 3D softwares for sure can import and read (e.g. RAW, PNG, JPG, OBJ, FBX, etc.). We do not directly export to a specific application format. To improve the workflow of compatibility, we have developed a Sync Tool – call it a bridge – which acts like a plugin for a specific application. It imports the exported World Creator data and create the proper instances inside the application context, e.g. an Unity terrain object or Unreal terrain object.
Regardless of the Sync Tool, you can import the content created with World Creator the traditional way and assemble everything on your own – the Sync Tool is just way more comfortable to use.
What are your production credentials?
World Creator is a very young product. Many game and movie studios purchased World Creator and they use it already for their productions. However, those are still under development and therefore classified – we are not allowed to talk about these. In a few months the first games will appear on the market – so it is just a matter of a few months when the first games appear where we then can say that World Creator was part of the workflow for creating the terrain – the entire team is looking forward to this already.
Which new features can we expect in upcoming version?
We do not want to talk about it yet, hope you understand. Expect something totally new and awesome – a revolution in 3D terrain and landscape creation. Actually, we wanted to include some of the new features in World Creator 2 but we have decided to redevelop the entire software from scratch using the latest technologies – the journey continues, prepare for another fantastic shot.
Check out image gallery of realistic 3D rendering outputs from World Creator software.
