Blender Bridge
The World Creator Bridge for Blender allows you to seamlessly import your terrain creations into Blender for use in your Blender projects.
Installation
Drag and drop the .zip file laying in the same directory as the ReadMe into Blender and press “OK” on the installation panel.
To open the bridge interface in Blender open the Sidebar in the 3D Viewport or press “N” while hovering over the 3D Viewport and select “WCBridge”.
Parameters
Terrain
In this tab you can import your terrain. All other steps in the bridge require a terrain to be imported first since they all build up on it.
Import
XML File
Locate the .xml file for the desired sync project. For WC 22 and above, this file is located by default at [User]\Documents\World Creator\Sync\
Prefix
Specify the prefix for all terrain objects and collections created by the bridge. Modify this parameter if you intend to import a second terrain, otherwise, the old one will be overwritten.
Import Layers
Switch between using individual terrain layers or a baked colormap in the generated material.
Adjust Clipping
Automatically adjusts the clipping distance of the viewport camera to ensure the whole terrain is visible. (Specifically changes the viewpoint camera and not the rendering camera!)
Reset Terrain
Allows you to protect any changes made to specific terrain objects from the synchronization process. Note that this only works if you keep the original names!
Reset Materials
Allows you to protect any changes made to specific material layers from the synchronization process. Note that this only works if you keep the original names!
Output
Allows you to switch between Blenders Cycles/Eevee or the output used for modding packages. Currently "Modding" only support GTA V specific Sollumz.
Parameters
World Scale
This parameter determines the scale factor for the terrain. (Default: 1 pixel in World Coordinates in width equals 1 meter in Blender)
Height Scale
Specifies the factor for scaling the height of the terrain.
Interpolation
Enables height-map interpolation. Interpolation is only applied on single-tile terrains by default, as it results in artifacts on the seams of multi-tile terrains.
Auto Subdivision
The subdivision of the generated mesh is automatically adjusted to the resolution of the synchronized heightmap to reduce sampling artifacts.
Subd Viewport/Render
The level of terrain subdivision can be set.
Vertex Reduction
Adds a Decimate Modifier to the mesh. 0 means no decimation, 1 full reduction.
Objects
With the arrival of WC 2025.1 you can now also sync your scattered objects into Blender using the WC Bridge. The bridge uses Geometry Nodes to distribute point cloud based and procedurally masked objects on your terrain. All parameters can be found below.
Import
Reset Objects
Overwrite all modifications made to objects on Import. This resets all objects back to the exported ones from WC.
Sync
Loads the objects from your synced WC project.
Systems
Shows you all available systems of the current terrain. You can add new ones with objects from your blender project, remove systems, sort/rename them and change their visibility in the viewport/render as well as quickly toggle the proxy status.
System
Object Identifier
A randomized identifier used for this object to differentiate objects from WC that have the same name. Automatically set up on sync.
Object Collection
The collection where the object that should be scattered is stored. There can be multiple objects in a collection, allowing you to use randomized variations in case you need it :)
Model Scale
The converted Modelscale from World Creator. Is automatically set on sync.
Distribution Type
Allows you to switch between Point Cloud and Procedural scattering. This is based on the Distribution Type in WC.
Display
Density Reduction
Applies a multiplier (0-1) to the density/pointclouds of all systems.
Use Active Camera
Allows you to specify the camera that is used for distance/frustum culling.
Frustum Culling
Enables frustum culling for the specified camera.
Culling Threshold
Adds a border around the cameras frustum to prevent object pop in for larger objects.
Export
Include Culled Instances
Includes currently culled objects in the export.
Realize selected System
Exports all instances of the currently selected system.
Realize all Systems
Exports the instances of all systems of the terrain.
Modding
The blender bridge supports terrain conversion for GTAV. This comes in the form of getting the terrain set up to be exported using Sollumz into Codewalker where you can then use it on your own GTAV server. Support for other modding platforms will be added in the future :)
Sollumz
The Sollumz terrain material setup is quite specific, requiring a mesh where materials are blended using the green and blue channels of the second vertex colours, with a maximum of four different textures blended on each polygon. This would work well for a few materials, but you'll probably have more than four. The solution is to find the strongest material on each face, create a unique material combination for it, and then assign the vertex colours based on our splat map data and combination order. The bridge does exactly that, but there's a catch: you can only use up to three individual materials for each blend, because of how vertex colour blending works. You could achieve the full four-material blend by hand painting and assigning it, but that could take up to several months of work for a developer. While slightly more materials should just be a minor performance compromise, it's still something to consider.
To get a nice result we advise to use the unpacked .dds textures from Codewalker directly in World Creator (WC materials support the .dds file type).
Collision Mesh
Creates a collision mesh with where only the strongest material on a face is assigned. This can then easily be replaced using Sollumz -> Create Collision Material -> Convert to Selected to assign the correct collision materials.
Create Drawable
This packs the collision mesh and terrain mesh into a ready to export drawable. (You still have to assign collision materials as described above)
Convert Terrain
Converts the terrain to be ready for Codewalker.
UV0 Scale
Adjusts the uv scale of the texture maps. The whole terrain only has one texture uv scale.
Workflow Example
This example illustrates the process of rendering terrain in Blender. The Canyon sample file that comes with World Creator will be used for this purpose. These steps can be applied to any other World Creator project.
Sync from World Creator
Click the sync button in the application bar at the top of the main panel to export all necessary data from World Creator automatically.
Sync into Blender
To open the bridge interface, press N in the viewing area and select 'WC Bridge' from the sidebar on the right. Then, click on the Synchronize button located at the bottom of the panel.
Since the Import Layers option was activated, all material layers from World Creator are now available as separate groups that can be modified further within Blender.
To give our terrain a winter look, we will transform the top sediment layer to resemble snow. To do this, open the Sediment subgroup and add a Mix node with a white color between the color map and the output. Although we could achieve a more precise outcome using World Creator, we will stick to Blender for the purpose of this guide.
The terrain should now appear as shown in the picture.
A significant advantage of using the bridge is the enhanced iteration speed between World Creator and Blender that it offers. To demonstrate this more clearly, alter the terrain's seed value to 1 in World Creator, resulting in a new scene that adheres to the original terrain's design patterns.
To preserve the snow cover modifications in our Blender material, we must deactivate the Reset Materials parameters in the bridge settings. The bridge consequently scans the terrain materials for existing subgroups, retaining any changes made to them in tandem with reloading all appropriate new textures. To make this work, you must retain the original names of the subgroups.
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