world construction set 3.15

Questar's World Construction Set 3 gives you a little taste of what it could have been like a long time ago when the Earth was created. From using Digital Elevation Maps of actual places on Earth, to dreaming up your own landscapes, WCS lets you create some pretty good-looking images and animations. It puts you in the creators seat and the laws of nature are your responsibility, so whether the planets surface is dry and barren, or filled with lush vegetation and forest lakes - it's all in your hands.

The strength of WCS lies in the way it handles high-resolution terrains, trees, clouds and water surfaces. If you ever tried using a 3D modeling application to create a complete landscape with lots of trees and bushes, you'll probably know about the quick death your system resources will die. WCS is a good companion for general 3D modeling and animation systems and to simplify compositing of elements, it comes with a plug-in for the latest versions of LightWave and 3D Studio MAX. There are no modeling tools in WCS and you can't import meshes from other applications for rendering.

Inside the box you'll not only find the manual and registration card, but also a hardware-lock, which fits onto the printer port. This won't affect printing and the lock gets along peacefully with the other 3 growing out the back of my computer. There are some sample pictures on the CD, but I looked in vain for sample animations. The CD comes with version 3.11 of WCS, which crashed occasionally. Nothing too serious, but since I downloaded the latest update from Questar's web site (currently version 3.15), WCS has been very stable.

WCS is not a ray-tracer, which is good news for anybody wanting to create animations. Terrains are made of polygons and fractals and before you render, you need to set the 'Fractal Depth' to a value between 1 and 9. Fractal Depth determines how many faces a polygon is sub-divided into, increasing apparent detail (and render times). Fractal Displacement adds some irregularity by moving the faces up and down. To keep render times within reasonable limits, WCS decreases the Fractal Depth with distance from the camera. Performance is actually very good, considering the complexity of rendered images. You can deactivate certain elements of your scene when rendering previews, which saves a lot of time when experimenting.

WCS borrows a few words from common terminology and redefines them for its own use. A vector, for instance, is a line that represents something that can be mapped onto the ground, like a lake or stream. An ecosystem is something to cover bare land, like a forest, grass or even rock. The manual is very well written and contains detailed tutorials and a detailed section on tips and tricks. There is an appendix called "A lesson in Geography", which makes for highly recommended reading to brush up on some basic geography.

The Amiga roots of WCS are still very visible in the Win95/NT version. Overall, the interface seems to lack a consistent identity and needs to be more interactive. The lack of interactivity applies mainly to MapView Control, where operations take up more mouse clicks than they should be. Working with vectors is also rather tedious. I aborted the sketching of a vector a few times and always had to go back into the Database Editor to delete the vector's name and start from scratch again. There must be a quicker way and this part of the interface should be more intuitive to work out such simple operations without the manual. Having placed some points in Map View to create a vector (which might later become a stream or road), I had lots of fun trying to modify its shape. First you need to enable 'Select/Show Points', select one or more points and then switch from 'Interactive Mode' to 'Move Mode' to move the points around. This makes fine tuning vectors a test of patience. Another annoyance is the lack of an application-wide Undo feature. All too often I forgot about this and just wanted to change a parameter quickly to view its effect on the terrain, ending up with no way of restoring back to the previous state. There is an 'Undo Last Edit' button in MapView Control, but it only works for certain operations within MapView. My overall impression on the interface is that it might not be the greatest, but it doesn't distract from the many great features and capabilities of this program.

I tested WCS on a PII-300 with 196MB of RAM and a Diamond FireGL 3000 with 32MB of texture memory, running under NT 4. So lets see what it can do!

There are several ways in WCS to start a new project. The Project Wizard creates a complete terrain and ecosystem for you, but you have limited control over how it will all turn out. You can specify the type of terrain like mountains, rolling hills, plains, canyons etc, the terrain resolution, time of day, whether you want an ocean, grass, trees, snow and so on. The Wizard can also make changes to an existing project. Professional visualization projects are likely to start by importing some real world Digital Elevation Maps (DEM files). There are several DEM's of actual places on the CD, including the Grand Canyon in all its glory. Creating your own terrain with the fractal DEM generator can be lots of fun. You can set the resolution, physical size and maximum elevation and WCS than creates a terrain based on a random seed. For total control, the DEM designer lets you create and shape your own DEM files. You can add additional DEM files to your current scene at any time.

nature rules - doesn't it?
The Ecosystem Editor lets you create whole Ecosystems and define the 'Rules of Nature'. Start by choosing a name like 'Conifer' or 'Pine' and then select the type of plants you want it to consist of. WCS comes with a great variety of pre-scanned and deep-etched tress, bushes, flowers and other types of vegetation. In this case, you want the 'Conifer' Ecosystem to consist of fir trees. You can either mix your own colors to fill the shape of a tree, or use the actual image colors. I found that most of the times the predefined colors of an Ecosystem looked too saturated and consequently desaturated them for my own scenes. The Rules of Nature define the type of terrain an Ecosystem can grow on. Texture Limits set the density and height of trees. Vertical Limits let you set the upper altitude and smoothen the transition from one Ecosystem to another (I had to read through the relevant pages of the manual a couple of times to understand how some of these parameters work). The Relative Elevation effect lets you place your trees on either concave or convex surfaces. This way you can control plant growth according to how much moisture and shadow some areas receive. With Lateral Limits you control what grows on steep slopes and what doesn't. The steeper places usually reveal bare rock and most trees are unlikely to grow on slopes steeper than 35 degrees. Every Ecosystem has an Understory, which is another Ecosystem revealed when the Overstory doesn't cover up all of the ground. Ecosystems are stacked upon each other and the first hit is used to grow something on the relevant piece of ground. The 'Catch-All Ecosystem' sits at the very bottom and usually reveals some type of extremity (like rock), where nothing else can grow. The Ecosystem Editor is very powerful and there are no limits to the type of layering, stacking and mixing of Ecosystems you can achieve. If you want to place individual trees, you need to use a Foliage Effect, which can be found in the Effects library. Close up trees look very good in general. When they really come close, you notice a lack of contrast and detail compared to the real thing.

digging up a little soil
Let's have a look how a simple lake scene can be created. The close-up of MapView shows how the lake scene is out. I used the Fractal DEM Generator to create a terrain of 100 square kilometers (it's actually bigger than what it needs to be for this scene). Next I explored the terrain a bit by moving the camera and its target around to find a suitable place for a lake. The visual success of a project greatly depends on placing objects over locations where they can physically exist. WCS provides you with a host of geographical information by clicking the mouse on certain points over the terrain. Together with the Measuring String you can plan the placement of your elements. For this scene, the camera is 3.5km above sea level. The steps for creating a lake and the surrounding scenery are actually part of the tutorial, which is very good and detailed. I started by drawing the vector defining the outline of the lake (light blue). Before you can have a lake, you need a lake bed to fill it up with water. The Effects Library contains effects that shape the terrain, like digging out a lake bed or raising the ground to build a road. Some other effects create streams, ecosystems or illumination effects. The lake bed is attached to an Area Terraffector, because the effect needs to apply to the area inside the vector. For the lake bed to look realistic, you need to create a Profile defining how the surrounding terrain changes into the lake bed. This way you get a gradual gradient down to the lake bottom, instead of a vertical drop. Effects are quite flexible and you can apply more than one effect to a vector. Applying a Lake Effect to the same vector fills the bed with water. The blue circles are wave generators, which ripple the lake's surface. By having more than one wave source, you can avoid patterns on the water which look too regular. WCS automatically creates white caps where the waves break along the shoreline. In this scene, the lake is about 7km long. The white and yellow rings denote the beginning of cloud and atmospheric haze.

The green vectors are patches of Ecosystem Effects. One of them surrounds the distant stream (dark blue vector) to form a meadow. The Vector Profile in the Stream Effects Editor helps you to determine if the stream is flowing downhill properly. I had to place mine several times to get it right. A cross section profile determines how the stream is dug into the ground. The amount of parameters can be a bit intimidating at this point and the best way is to play around a bit and see how they effect the scene. You have a lot of control over the way a stream blends into its surrounding area. The Measuring String next to the stream shows that it is about 3.5km long when seen from above.

I got some weird stepping effects in a close-up of my stream after rendering at a resolution of 800 x 600 with a fractal of 9. I couldn't get them to disappear after changing a few parameters, but wasn't too worried since it was my first attempt anyway. The many parameters and terminology involved when creating streams requires some amount of study and experimentation, I guess.

One of the best features is that all these effects are entirely non-destructive and do not alter the underlying terrain permanently. You can modify or remove a lake, or any other type of effect, at any time you want.

Clouds are created by placing Cloud Planes over the terrain. There are 4 cloud models to choose from: Cirrus, Stratus, Nimbus and Cumulus. Cirrus is the easiest to use and creates a nice and soft cloud cover. So far, my all Cumulus clouds look like cylindrical Marshmallows, but I'm hoping that a little more experience will enable me to create more realistic ones.

opengl
The OpenGL preview is great! A spinner lets you set the level of detail and with the FireGL 3000 I could set it up for maximum grid resolution and still get a smooth and interactive display. You get an excellent feel for your terrain and this is definitely one of the best OpenGL implementations I've seen. Moving the camera through the mountains and cliffs of the 'Desert' sample file produced a totally smooth and detailed OpenGL preview, looking almost eerie. You can also select a Wire and Solid Grid preview, but with a good OpenGL card these are rather redundant, except when you need wire frames for certain alignment tasks. The performance of the many and affordable hardware accelerated OpenGL cards, like those based on Permedia 2 chips, should be nearly identical to that of the more expensive FireGL 3000.

wcs squared
A real productivity booster is the ability to run multiple instances of WCS simultaneously. This also makes up a little for the lack of multiprocessing support (something every renderer should have). While I was experimenting and working through the tutorials, I opened multiple copies of WCS, one on the desktop to work in and the others rendering with low priority in the background. The developers applied some common sense and included a priority setting right in the Render dialog. This works like a dream under NT's multitasking and saves you from having to set the priority in Task Manager. With enough RAM in your machine, there is no impact on response times when running multiple copies. You might even want to run two copies of the same project, render a preview in one and keep on working in the other. Multiprocessing on a dual CPU machine can be achieved by opening two copies of the same project. Let's say you're rendering a 200 frame animation. Let the one WCS render frames 0 - 100 and the second one frames 101 - 200 (gives you 201 frames to be exact). You can assign each WCS to a CPU by setting the Affinity in Task Manager, but this is hardly necessary since NT does a pretty good job at managing system resources. You can also save valuable CPU cycles by disabling the Preview Window when rendering in the background, saving the CPU from having to send the rendered pixels to the display card. When saving rendered frames, WCS supports a number of file formats, such as TGA, BMP and Amiga IFF.

Wherever you find a little key frame icon next to a spinner box, the parameter can be animated. Cloud planes can be animated in such a way that you see them forming and dissolving into different patterns. Like water, clouds are brought to life by wave generators, which can have their amplitude, wavelength and speed animated. The animation system in WCS is quite simple and is based on keyframes. A Timeline lets you fine-tune your animation by setting the tension between points on a motion graph. With some basic 3D experience, you'll master WCS animations straight away. Plug-ins for LightWave and 3D Studio MAX let you composite 3D models with WCS landscapes. The distance information of a terrain is saved into Z-Buffer files, which are optionally created during rendering. In MAX, for instance, the plug-in lets you coordinate your camera and motion paths between the two applications. The final compositing is done through Video Post.

There are a few points in WCS 3 still needing improvement, mainly the interface. It would also be nice to have support for multiple processors when rendering. Strictly speaking, rendered images still have some way to go to achieve true photo-realism. Colors are too saturated and the contrast and color depth is still far from close to real terrains and trees. This, however, goes for all applications attempting to mimic nature and WCS is certainly one of the best at this game. From a practical point of view, the realism of scenes is more than adequate for visualization projects. We have just modeled a whole shopping complex in MAX and thought we could take photographs of the future construction site for use as backdrops. This didn't quite work out, as the site is still wild and inaccessible. This is just one instance where WCS comes to the rescue and lets us recreate the environment around the shopping complex and combine it with our MAX model - and this is after placing about 20 3D trees in MAX and seeing the polygon count rise by halve a million. Needless to say, the trees disappeared out of the scene rather quickly. So is WCS worth its money? It sure is, whether you are re-creating landscapes for professional projects, or just want to have some fun with your computer.


Robin Lankes is the senior member of Animatix Design, a South African based 3D Animation and Visualization company. Robin can be reached at robinl@taiga.co.za.

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