One of my favorite things to do is stalk crocodiles. We have many fresh water crocs out here.

Most of the pictures below are from the last few years when Cynthia and I were doing our best to get close to these little cuties.

Modern graphics applications, especially procedural graphics software, require an inordinate amount of numbers to work. The most typical representation of a setting is a spinner (textbox with up/down buttons) or a slider, or both.

The effort required to set values gets greater a...

The Erosion Device is arguably the most powerful device in World Machine. The flow and deposit data generated by the device is invaluable. This data is used as masks, texture-generators, demarcation limits, and so on. However, one of the most common problems you can run into is that somewhere down the line from the erosion device, you make changes to the terrain and the erosion data supplied by the device becomes incompatible with the terrain shape.

I have a pretty decent volcano terrain created with a somewhat complex graph in World Machine. The graph and the resulting terrain output can be seen below.

In World Machine, one of the key reasons people use multiple erosion devices is to create stronger vertical/flow lines. However, this presents a few problems:

First of all, the erosion device is a powerful mechanism for altering the terrain, and it will modify your terrain's shape...

A little over a month ago, I switched my team to TargetProcess (TP) for our projects (Helios and GeoGlyph). I’m rarely impressed this much by software – especially software for software development. I’ve been making developer tools for 15-odd years, so I can be very critical sometimes. Not only was I impressed, I’ve found myself actively promoting them.

I've always been a fan of terrain folding. The desert area I live in has rock formations where you can see how the rock slab might have folded under tectonic pressures. You can also see it on a much larger scale in places like Zion National Park in Utah.

The idea of terrains folds in game...

We have seen a great rise in GeoGlyph’s usage in game projects that use Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. UE4 is a very powerful engine that is easy to use. I have been experimenting with some of our terrains, and below is a recording of a little flyover on a very large terrain create in World Machine using GeoGlyph’s ThermalShatter plugin.