World Builder Pro 3.5: creating the great outdoors.(Digital Element's landscape generation program)(Product/Service Evaluation)

World Builder is a landscape generation program from Digital Element that enables users to make and place mountains and terrain details such as rivers, lakes, and oceans, then fill the resulting landscapes with a great variety of flora--all as precisely as anyone with a god-complex could desire. This tool is useful for game developers, digital artists, and visual effects artists who make digital mattes. With World Builder, you can invent fantastic new worlds of re-create your own backyard.

I have liked World Builder ever since its first release in 1995. While the latest version has a lot of great features, the new rain, snow, and 3D clouds lead the list. Rain and snow are simple enough to add to a scene. The library offers four pre-sets ranging from light rain to major storm. Once you drag and drop the precipitation into a scene, you can change all the parameters to suit your needs. Making rain into snow is easy: Snow is basically rain with higher air friction, rotation, and slower velocity settings.

The snow particles default as diamonds, though you can add included snowflake textures to change each flake into the tiny, intricate stars you used to make in grade school. This level of detail is fine for cartoon animation, but not for realistic simulations. The default diamonds, on the other hand, look great when made sufficiently small and placed far enough away from the camera.

The new 3D clouds look fantastic. If you like, you can fly through them for great-looking animations, but expect long render times. The 3D Clouds feature makes use of voxels. The more voxels, the better the clouds will look, but the trade-off is in increased render time.

To change the look of a cloud, you can adjust the Spheres Numbers slider, which adds secondary spheres around the primary cloud figure. You can also modify the shape of a primary cloud figure by using a Bezier curve in the Cloud Profile Dialog to adjust the upper portion of the cloud. And you can set procedural animation of the cloud by adjusting the Swirling slider.

Version 3.5 also offers a new surf model that uses particles to represent the foamy whitewash of oncoming and overturning waves. This provides a realistic look, though the setup does take some work. Your efforts will be partly reduced, however, if you use a new feature, the Water Wizard, which helps create river, lakes, and oceans. This Wizard is helpful and can get you started creating realistic-looking water until you get the hang of it and wish to venture ...