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Tech Reviews World Creator 3
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orld Creator, developed by BiteTheBytes, came from modest means about a decade ago and evolved into a plugin for Unity, and shortly after into a standalone product sitting on top of the Unity engine. This year the third reincarnation of World Creator was released, untethering itself from Unity exclusively and growing into its own, GPU-accelerated, real-time landscape generator — with numerous features to help you design the landscapes to your liking. The power of World Creator is not just in the real-time rendering, because what is the point of rendering something that doesn’t look good? No, the power is in its procedural tools to allow you to quickly sculpt and design your world. You can craft your own landscape using different filters like ridges, craters, terrace, rocky surfaces, choose from template patterns of things like canyons or volcanos, or use real-world locations through MapTiler. In addition, you can mix all of those together — And if that weren’t enough, you can top it off with erosion and sediment systems, all in real time. And that’s just the surface What is a terrain without color and shading? World Creator utilizes Substance 3D shaders in the .sbsar format, so you can dig in and modify the shaders within World Creator itself. Or you can utilize a number of maps like albedo, normal, ambient occlusion, displacement and roughness. Then, you can mix these with gradients or rule-based filters driven by the features of the terrain — slope, height, cavity, angles, edges, noise … just to name a few. And now with your terrain looking pretty, you can render it using all the things: ray-tracing, global illumination, clouds, atmospheric scattering, fog, God rays, water. Literally, all the things. In real time. You can also export your terrain to any number of formats to be used in any 3D package you would like: Unity (naturally) and Unreal 4 (support for 5 is in the works), Maya, Max, Clarisse, Houdini. There are a few things missing in this build — but they have been announced for future builds: unlimited terrain, custom object imports (like trees and foliage), camera animation, procedural rivers, thermal erosion, a terrain wizard to build up terrains quickly and easily,
by Todd Sheridan Perry
and a bunch more filters. I did do a review of World Creator 2 a few years ago, but please understand that this is a pretty substantial rebuild. The third release has a higher price tag than the previous one; the price for a hobbyist is $349 to buy, and $689 for pros. You could also rent annually for half that per year. If you need environments, the investment shouldn’t even be a thing. Website: world-creator.com Annual Price: $169 (individual); $349 (small co.); $1,289 (large co.)
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RealityScan
or a long time, RealityCapture has been my go-to software for photogrammetry, even before they were acquired by Epic Games. So when I received notification of an iOS app from the same team that would allow for scanning from your device, I immediately jumped on the Beta. And it was a good thing that I responded. The 10,000 open slots were filled within a few hours after the mail was sent. Even in its Beta stage, RealityScan is robust and effective. The interface is clean and straightforward and the steps are clear. You begin by holding down the red “take picture” button. Then you move around the object you are scanning, taking picture after picture to get enough coverage for the photogrammetry scan. This is the normal process for photogrammetry, but what’s cool about RealityScan is that it utilizes the AR in your device to leave your snapshots floating in space, as seen through the iPhone. You get to see exactly how much coverage you have around the object, and, in turn, how much more you need to cover. In the process, the app begins to show you voxels representing the volume of your object. From there, you can adjust the size of your scanning volume to tell the app what to cull and what to calculate. After the app aligns the images, the data is sent to the cloud where the model is calculated utilizing the same algorithms that power the full version of RealityCapture. When the model is complete, it is sent to your SketchFab account for you to accept and publish. The results are really clean, especially if you provide enough pictures. And the interactive nature of the process is actually pretty fun. It’s definitely set up for scanning objects rather than, say, environments. I’m a bit surprised that it doesn’t utilize the LIDAR camera in the iOS devices to help in the calculations. RealityCapture definitely can use multiple sources of data for its model solves. That said, I am turned off by the fact that your mod-
els appear to be trapped in the Epic ecosystem — which is great if you plan to keep everything in Unreal Engine, but not so much if you are using other 3D software. Sure, you could import your Sketchfab model into Unreal using the plugin, and then export it as an FBX. But it certainly would be more convenient if you could download directly from Sketchfab. I suppose I could get over that in time. I look forward to the release version of RealityScan, too. I would have waited on a review until then, but I was so excited about it, that I thought the photogrammetry community ought to be looking forward to it as well. Website: capturingreality.com
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Foundry’s Flix 6.4
couple of years ago, I reviewed Foundry’s Flix 6.2, the collaborative animatic software which connects the animatic source software (mostly likely Photoshop or Storyboard Pro) to the editing software (Avid or Premiere) and acts as a hub for creative discussions between the director and the artists. The 6.4 version of the product has been recently released, and it offers some new features to speed things up, make it more efficient and be more flexible. For me, the coolest features are about the interconnectivity between the different software in the workflow: the glue that holds things together. In 6.4, that glue is stronger between Storyboard Pro, Flix and Avid with camera keyframes stored inside of the AAF files.
Basically, camera moves from Storyboard Pro get transferred over to Flix, which then migrate to Avid through the AAF file. However, with this new version, the editor can make modifications to that camera, which can then continued on page 45
www.animationmagazine.net 44
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august 22
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