Terrain Mixer
(https://blendermarket.com/products/terrain-mixer)
When I first saw the demo video I was very excited, but I decided that, having spent serious money on World Creator 2, I would give it a pass. Well, yesterday I went back and had another look. I decided that there's maybe less overlap between the two scenary creators than I first thought.
World Creator is a full-fledged landscape generator, its enormously powerful, but what you generate then needs to be exported to Blender. That process usually ends up being lossy. On the other hand, Terrain Mixer runs out of Blender's node system, it uses a crazy node-spagetti to generate landscapes using lots of clever manipulation of super-high-resolution displacement maps. The results can look stunning but right now I'm struggling to intuit how the control the output. While it's easy enough to spin dozens of sliders, knowing what will happen as a result is another thing. I'm sure I need to watch more tutorials and put in a few more hours practice. It's been a bit unstable, but I'm still excited at the prospects for this amazing tool.
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| Render from above! |
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| Default settings |
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| Fake sky FTW. Impressive slick rocks eh! |
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| The detail. The DETAIL. It's incredible. |
As impressive as these landscapes are, they're little changed from the default. I'm beginning to understand how changes to the node system can result in big significant alterations, such as the addition of canyons, or a different material selection.
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| Trusty old World Creator. Getting comparable detail in a WC terrain usually entails the importing of a gigabyte-scale mesh. |
There's still room for World Creator, which feels more like you are painting the landscape rather than tweaking sliders.
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