Lesson 03: We will add water and will set the placing conditions for the material. WorldBuilder 3.5. for. About Digital Element Tutorials:

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Lesson 03: We will add water and will set the placing conditions for the material for WorldBuilder 3.5 About Digital Element Tutorials: This tutorial is available both in.

1 Lesson 03: We will add water and will set the placing conditions for the material for WorldBuilder 3.5 About Digital Element Tutorials: This tutorial is available both in.pdf format and in Qarbon format, a multimedia system that allows you to see the interface at work. You can find the Qarbon version of this tutorial, as well as other tutorials at To use this tutorial, you will need to have the full version of WorldBuilder or WorldBuilder Pro. Making sure your product has a valid license number and registration and is correctly installed is very important to getting started. If you cannot load the filter at all, please consult the FAQ s on our website for additional support.

2 Step 1: Opening WorldBuilder In this tutorial we will continue building the scene started in Tutorials 1 and 2. Here is the image that we rendered at the end of the previous tutorial. In Tutorial 3 we will add water and will set the placing conditions for the material and vegetation so that they will be conistent with the water level. After we create the water object, we will need to place it in the scene. We will use Shaded OpenGL rendering to speed up moving the water object around. For even faster feedback, we will hide all the areas containing grass and vegetation. Select Areas 2 through 4 by ctrl+click. Also you can shift+click for a continous selection, just as you might do in Windows Explorer.

3 Right-click on the selection. It will bring up a pop-up menu with common operations that are applicable to all objects in the selection. Select Hide. When hidden, objects appear grayed out in the Object Tree. Render the scene with OpenGL rendering.

4 Shaded OpenGL mode is very convenient for many editing tasks, like adjusting location of objects. In this mode you can see just enough of the scene even for very precise tuning. Step 2: Create a Lake object Use the Creation Tool Bar to create a Lake object. It is a simple square water surface with reflection, transparency and ripples. Example of manipulate Lake object

5 Immediately, you will see the blue surface which represents the Lake object. We want to move the water slightly higher. Select the Move tool. Refresher. You can do this by using the top toolbar or by rightclicking in the viewport which brings up a popup menu.

6 You can zoom into the window to obtain greater precision while moving the Lake object. Refresher. Here is the icon that turns on the zoom mode. Moving objects with the manipulator gives realtime feedback on the location of the water surface.

7 If dragging with the manipulator does not allow you to move the object with enough precision, you can always enter a numerical value for the object location. Type in new number and press enter. Next, re-render the viewport with OpenGL rendering to see changes.

8 Make a note of the altitude at which we placed the Lake object. We will use this number later. After we are satisified with the location of the Lake object, we can render it in a higher quality. Before doing that, though, we need to perform some tweaking of the default water parameters. Select Area1 of Water0 object, and find the Fresnel Water shader. If we plan to tweak the scene or animate the camera, we need the reflection rendered in every frame. Since we do not want to spend too much time on redundantly rendering the high quality reflection, we selected a Quality of 25 percent for it. It will make the reflection render many times faster.

9 Example of water photometry parameters Advanced techniques. Let us set water photometry parameters as shown here. Higher Power helps to generate an almost mirror-like look for the water. Higher Specular values give brighter highlights. Small ambient and diffuse values give impression of clean transparent water, while higher values create a muddy opaque look. Finally, set colors and the Deep-at value as here. Deep-at defines the depth to which the water retains transparency. If values are set too high, the water may become almost entirely transparent, so we need to choose a value smaller than the default value.

10 Render the scene with Preview rendering. We will add sand material along the water to give greater definition to the shore line. To add another material into Area 1, select it and right- click on its properties. Select Add command.

11 Select Material in Area. The material is initially created empty and will render itself black. We can add different components called Shaders to make the material look realistic. Select the Material in Area node.

Right-click on it and select Add. The Add command is context sensitive. Here it displayed all of the available shaders that we can put into the material.

12 Right-click on it and select Add. The Add command is context sensitive. Here it displayed all of the available shaders that we can put into the material. Shaders are arranged into groups for easier navigation in the extensive list. We need Constant Color from Texture/Color section. Click on Constant Color to select it. Don't press Ok yet.

Ctrl+click on another item - Phong photometry at Photometry/Reflection section. It will allow you to add two shaders simultaniously to the material. Then press OK.

13 Ctrl+click on another item - Phong photometry at Photometry/Reflection section. It will allow you to add two shaders simultaniously to the material. Then press OK. Example of Material in Area Here you see the two new components in the material that we are building. Advanced. Material components (shaders) have to work together to calculate the correct color of the object. While each of the shaders may create a very simple effect, their combination can create infinite variations for the object's color. The Constant Color shader defines a generic solid color for the object. Without photometry it would look flat since it is not sensitive to the direction, color and intensity of light. Pick a sand-like color here. This will define base color of the sand.

14 Photometry allows you to define how the surface appearance is affected by the lighting. It needs some base color which is usually provided by Constant Color Shader or Texture Shader. Photometry does not produce anything useful without a base color. Advanced: Ambient defines how bright the base color will be. The Constant color shader together with the Ambient component of the Phong Shader still creates only a flat appearance. Diffuse defines how bright the parts of the surface lit by the lightsource will be. The Moon surface visible from Earth, for example, shines mostly with the diffuse component. With diffuse component you can clearly see what part of the object is facing the lightsource. Specular adds highlights. We do not want highlights on the sand.

15 You can render a preview using Preview icon here as you adjust shader parameters. The Preview appears in a separate small window. It uses the same lights that you have in the scene so the appearance of the material is identical to what you will obtain in the scene rendering.

16 Now we are going to specify where we want the sand to appear. The Placing Conditions dialog allows you to specify this in a very precise manner. First we have to enable Placing Conditions by unchecking the Ignore All check box. As you remember, the Lake object was located at the altitude of approximately 0.4 units. So we need to place the sand a little bit higher. We entered the range After you change the altitude range, you can check how it affects the material distribution by previewing it.

17 The default projection is the top view and only shows the general layout. Let us change the size and the projection of the preview window to make it more helpful for our purposes. Stretch the window first by pulling one of its corners and then right click on its caption. Select the Camera projection from the list of available projections.

18 The white color indicates where the sand material will appear. Render the view with Preview rendering. Advanced. Now we have some sand but the boundary between the green and the yellow is too blurry. We can adjust this using Area feathering parameters. Select Area to access the properties common for all materials in it.

19 The Area feathering options allow to adjust how soft or hard the transition will be between areas and between materials inside one area. The boundary in our case is defined by the altitude condition. So we need to reduce feathering that depends on the altitude from 0.1 (default) to a smaller (0.05) value. The new rendering shows better boundary. It is still soft enough but not too much. The problem however is that it is unnaturally smooth or straight. We can address this with a Fractalizer.

20 Right click on Area and select Add from its pop-up menu. Since the boundary between sand and green material is based on the altitude, we should pick Altitude Fractalizer from the three fractalizers available.

21 The Amplitude parameter tells us how much the true altitude will be disturbed when the object is rendered. We have water at an altitude of 0.4; the upper altitude of the sand is about 1.5, so 0.25 for the fractalizer amplitude should be a good first shot. It will make random variations of the altitude in the range of +/ units when rendering sand and green material. The new bundary has been greatly improved. Further tweaking of the boundary can be done with two other parameters - Fragmentation and Details. Smaller values for Fragmentation stretch the pattern, and higher values tile the pattern tighter. For greater details you will finer details on the current pattern. Practical values for the Details are under 5. Details set too high can lead to flickering in animations. End of advanced section.

22 Now with the boundary in between the sand and the green material finalized, we have to bring grass and other vegetation back to the image. Let us use Incremental Design. Click on the icon above. Refresher. Incremental design allows you to keep the current rendered image and hides already rendered objects automatically. When you render the scene next time, only newly added objects will be rendered. This speeds up the design process dramatically. Make a note concerning the high boundary of the sand material. We will use it as a reference in a minute.

23 Right-click on Area 2 with the grass and select Show. Area 2 is not grayed out any more. Enable the grass Placing conditions dialog by unchecking Ignore All check box.

24 Let's make a lower boundary for grass slightly higher than the high boundary of the sand material (which was 1.5, as we noted before). Render the grass with Preview rendering and use Incremental Design again. Note that the grass is growing slightly higher than the sand, as we planned. Unhide the area with the trees. They are far from the water so we can just render them without fine tuning their placing conditions.

25 Then use Incremental design again to add trees to the image. Unhide the last area. It is the area with flowers. Right-click to get to the pop-up menu and select Show. In the Placing Conditions dialog we had entered the same values as we had for the grass.

26 Advanced. Before rendering the flowers, we had the entire scene on the image except for the flowers. We used this as an opportunity to fine tweak the flowers' height. And then we rendered the flowers onto the image. As you may have noticed, the reflection was not updated while we were adding objects to the z-buffer. To obtain the final image with correct reflections we need to discard the image and unhide all objects. Then they will appear in the reflection. Remember that we have reflection set up to render each frame so that it will be updated for the next rendering. Press Incremental Design Step Backward. With the Z-buffer gone, the scene is rendered with schematic rendering. Press the Production rendering icon.

27 Here is the image. Advanced: rendering performance tip. The flowers are barely visible in the reflection.so we can switch them off from the reflection map rendering. Select Area 4 and uncheck the Draw in reflections option for flowers.

28 Advanced techniques. To improve the water's appearance, we would need to tweak its parameters and test run rendering several times. We can use Incremental Design again to speed up the process. Hide water and render the scene. Reflection map was previously generated and we want to reuse it in the following test renderings. Select Never in reflection map options.

29 Press Incremental Design first and then unhide water. Now you can tweak the water's parameters and obtain almost immediate feedback. What is important besides speed is that you will see how the new parameters work correctly in the scene, not in some prerender preview. This concludes our tutorial. You have used theopengl shaded mode for fast and precise manipulation of the Lake object. You learned how to specify placing conditions and how to fine tune them. Also you learned about shaders and Water parameters. Additionally we demonstrated an application of Incremental Design for tuning water.

World Builder 3 Tutorial Manual

World Builder 3 Tutorial Manual Chapter Name & Section Name 1 C2 Basic Concepts Installation 13 Starting World Builder 16 Exiting World Builder 17 Tutorial 1 19 Tutorial 2 24 WorldBuilder is a remarkable