Materials
Overview
World Creator offers an extensive toolset for texturing your terrain. Similar to filters, materials work in a bottom-up fashion and can be masked using the Distribution System.
Material Settings
Tint
Tints the material.
Metalness
Controls the metallic strength of the material.
Roughness
Controls the roughness of the material.
Use Shape Layer Color
Some Shape Layers (e.g. MapTiler Layer, Stamp Layer) carry their own supplemental albedo information. If this option is enabled, the material will display the combined shape layer color data as its color information.
Enable Emission
This enables the Emissive Strength slider for this material, creating a luminescent material.
Texturing Settings
Texture Type
This allows you to switch between all the different texture types. It enables you to link textures in various arrangements to the material.
Texture Type - None
This is the most basic type of material, which uses the Tint Color provided in the material settings for colouring. No other texture detail is used.
Texture Type - Set / Package
The 'Texture Type - Set' option allows you to assign textures individually to the standard PBR shader. It can automatically import multiple textures for a material based on their names (e.g. 'Grass_Color', 'Grass_Normal', and so on).
The Texture Type - Package works similarly, though it uses a ZIP file containing all the textures. This makes it easy to apply materials with one click.
Texture Type - Substance
This allows you to load Substance materials. The properties exposed in the Substance UI are displayed in WC and can be adjusted to tweak the exposed material parameters using the Substance Engine.
Shared Parameters
These parameters are available for all texture types except 'None'.
Saturation
Alters the saturation of the albedo texture.
Contrast
Alters the contrast of the albedo texture.
Brightness
Alters the brightness of the albedo texture.
Normal Strength
Changes the strength of the normal texture.
Flip Normal Y
Flips the up channel of the normal map. Some rendering engines have inverted Y channels for normal maps, this allows you to load in all kinds of normal maps.
Is Gloss
Switches the roughness map to be interpreted as a gloss map.
Tile Size
Adjusts the tile size of the final material.
Tile Offset X/Y
Shifts the texture in the X/Y direction.
Triplanar Projection
Applies triplanar projection to the material. This means that the texture is not only projected from the top down as usual, but is also projected from the X, Y and Z axes and then blended together. This results in a material that is able to add detail to steep surfaces that would normally be problematic due to stretched UVs. Triplanar Projection is a shader-based effect that cannot be exported as a texture. To get the same effect in your preferred rendering engine, look for a triplanar shader in their respective material system.
Stochastic Distribution
Switches the standard tile based sampling to a randomized sampler that reduces visible tiling over large areas. The Stochastic Distribution is a shader-based effect that can be exported in a baked colour map of the terrain. However, if you plan to use tiled textures (which is highly recommended for close up detailed terrain), you'll need to look for a similar shading effect in your render engine.
Height Blending
Applies height blending to the material. This works in conjunction with a displacement texture.
Displacement Enabled
Enables displacement for the material.
Height Scale
Adjusts the height of the displacement.
Gradient Settings
Gradients can be added to every material in World Creator. This can be used to further enhance base materials or texture details with procedurally generated, terrain-adjusted gradient colouring. When you use the gradient features, a second distribution stack (Gradient Distribution) becomes available, where you can create the base gradient used for colour application.
Parameters
Gradient Enabled
Enables the gradient settings for this material.
Gradient Panel
Allows you to build your gradient. The gradient is mapped left to right (between the lower to indicators) to the black to white gradient produced by the Gradient Distribution specified in the material.
Invert Gradient
Inverts the sampling direction of the Gradient Distribution stack.
Saturation
Alters the saturation of the resulting gradient material.
Contrast
Alters the contrast of the resulting gradient material.
Brightness
Alters the brightness of the resulting gradient material.
Gradient Detail
Adds additional noise to the gradient to increase the detail of the resulting color map.
Seed
The Seed of the Gradient Detail noise.
Detail Strength
Controls the impact the details have on the source gradient.
Detail Probability
Adjust the amount of details added to the gradient.
Shading Strength
Defines the strength of the change of brightness in the details.
Offset Strength
Defines the similarity of the details to neighboring colors. A large offset strength means that the detail contains similarities to colors further away while a small value means that the details stick to the neighboring colors.
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