World Creator 3 has a new Beta! I must refresh my export procedure

 World Creator 3 is an amazing realtime terrain generator. It has a really nice render engine that gives nice and fast results, but Blender obviously has more power and flexibility. That said, I have never been particularly happy with my workflow. Mostly because the texture maps that you generate in World Creator are too small for big landscapes.

I'm going to sumerise the steps to take -- to help me keep them in mind. They're taken from Blender film-maker Martin Klenker's youtube tutorials.

1. Don't export meshes, in most cases they'll be far too big to store (Gigabytes) and squeezing such a file into your Blender pipeline will just make everything slow and maybe run you out of memory.

Instead, use giant 32-bit height maps. In World Creator, this is though the Exr format. Otherwise go with all the default values.

 In Blender 

1. Create a plane, 2000 by 2000 units    
2. Subdivide to about 80x80

3. Fix the scale, making the plain 1-scale. Ctrl+A, select Scale.
4. Add a displacement, set its coordinates to UV

5. Create a New Texture.
6. Go to the texture panel. Select Open. Navigate to your Exr Hightmap and load it.
7. Ensure the texture maps colour space is set to Linear.
8. On the displace panel, adjust the strength. The large dimensions of the plain will probably mean that you need to go with a high strength value.

9. Add a subdivsion surface modifier to increase the mesh density and bring out the terrain's fine detail. Select 5 for the render level, something less for the display port.

In case you get raised edges on your terrain, where Blender hasn't displaced them:

1. Select the edge rows.

2. Add them to a new vertex group. Add the edges.

3. Under the displace modifier, add a Mask modifier, select your vertex group, then invert. This drops down any raised edges.

Material Steps

In the shader editor:

1. Assign an BSDF shader to the plain.
2. Assuming you have Node Wrangler, click on the shader box and select Ctrl+T. You'll get a pre-mapped texture. Select your colour map and plug it into the base colour.
3. Add an additional map, this time connect it to a Normal Map Shader.

4. Add an RBG to BW filter, apply it to the Specular, using your colour map as the input.

5. Increase the roughness value. Maybe 0.8

6. As colour mapping from Blender is usually too dark by default, you might add an RBG colour ramp to the colour output. Tweak to make it brighter.

Typical basic material setup

Terrain Texture

As the texture maps are usually too small to do a good terrain justice, this is where you use the splat maps, these are a set of masks that you can use to separate different textures. You'll need to use a photo editor for this work.

 That's it.
I should sign up for Martin's course.