Go with the FlowScape

I found out about this FlowScape style program thanks to a poster on the FlowScape discord.

Like FlowScape it allows you to create digital art using a wide range of premade assets. Though while FlowScape uses the Unity engine, WorldMaker uses Unreal 5.

There are a couple of caveats. WorldMaker is Windows only. if you use Linux then you can run it using Proton, but OSX users are currently out of luck.

Secondly due to the assets used the only commercial uses allowed for the art you create are either monetised youtube videos or live streams.

Rather than selecting an asset and then painting it onto the scene, you have to drag the assets onto the scene one at a time which means creating a field full of foliage is more bother than it would be with FlowScape. The organisation of the various assets isn’t great, which makes finding a specific one difficult. Though this is less of a problem due to there being a search feature.

This is the starting scene. The only terrain available is this concrete slab, and there’s no way to sculpt it. 

I’ve had it a few days and these are some of the images that I’ve made so far

It’s missing some of the features that FlowScape has (such as oceans and volumetric fog) but it also has some extra features (such as procedural volumetric clouds).

It’s $10 (or about £7) so I’d say that if you like FlowScape and want to try something new then it’s worth picking up.

One of the additions that’s coming with Blender 3.0 is the asset browser. You configure a folder as your library folder and if any of the .blend files in that folder contain objects that have been marked as an asset that object will appear in the browser. Then to add it to a scene you can just drag and drop it into the scene view.

It takes some work to get a library set up, but once it is it makes reusing objects between scenes a lot easier.

The generated terrain can be exported as an obj file which can then be imported into other 3D software such as FlowScape

The thing that makes this interesting is it allows you to paint grass, trees and other plants onto a landscape without having to set up particle systems and vertex groups.

This is my first attempt, which took less than ten minutes

This was the node system I used to create it

Earlier I talked about using textures to give water the appearance of having ripples. This is fine for still images, but what if you want an animation. So now I’m going to talk about adding animated ripples to water.

FlowScape has 2 sliders which control the appearance of snow on the terrain and another which controls snow appearing on most of the objects.

Blender comes with a real snow addon which can accomplish something similar.

First off you need to turn it on by going to the addons section of the preferences and searching for snow

In the layout mode select the object you want to add snow to and press the n key to bring out the sidebar then select the real snow tab.

you can select what proportion of the top surface is covered and how deep the snow is. It’s also possible to only add snow to the selected faces.

Then click on the add snow button.

The render looks like

This addon uses metaballs to create the snow which gives better looking snow which has depth. The downside is it’ll probably cause performance issues if there’s a lot of snow covered objects in the scene.

Previously I wrote about how you can use particles systems to paint grass similarly to how you do in FlowScape, but what if you want to have different types of grass in an area? Or what if you want to have a grassy field with flowers spread amongst the grass?

It turns out it’s possible to do these things with just one particle system by using collections

FlowScape has multiple different types of water. There’s a water plane which can be bound to the landscape or extend to infinity, an infinite ocean plane, a water disc, rivers and a waterfall.

In this post I’m going to discuss how to recreate the water plane and water disc object resulting in an image like this

I then recreated the scene in FlowScape

A feature that has been teased for a future FlowScape update is procedurally generated clouds. (At the moment you can fake the effect using volumetric fog, but the previews look better).

The good news is Simon Thommes has written a shader for Blender which does the same thing which you can download from here - https://blenderartists.org/t/procedural-cloudscape-generation-in-cycles-now-eevee/694700/11

The bad news is that it doesn’t have any instructions and AFAICT it hasn’t been updated in more than 2 years, still it gets the job done.

After downloading the blend file there’s 2 ways to use it in a scene

1) Add the shader by appending ProceduralCloudscapev0.4.blend->NodeTree->ProceduralCloudscape_v0.4. Then add a cube to your scene and add a material. In the shader editor delete the Principle BSDF and add a Group->ProceduralCloudscape_v0.4 connecting the Cloud Volume output to the Volume input of the Material Output node.

2) Add a configured cube by adding ProceduralCloudscapev0.4.blend->Object->Custom Cloudscape. This has an image texture node connected to Cloud Distribution input which you can either replace or delete

Once you have a cube with the shader attached it’s just a matter of moving it to the right place and then tinkering with the settings until you’re happy with the effect

If you want the clouds to animate like in the video above then you need set the Wind Strength option to something above 0 and set the wind direction. This needs to be a vector with the components of the direction. So if you want the wind to just go along the x axis it’d be [1,0,0]. If you want the wind along the y axis it’d be [0,1,0].

The only way I could figure out to provide a vector input was by adding a Converter->Vector Math node set to Add mode. I put the values I wanted in the first vector and left the second one as all 0′s.