World Blender - Advanced landscape generator (Blender 4.1)

World Blender empowers you to sculpt epic and natural-looking landscapes within Blender with ease. This comprehensive library of node groups for Geometry Nodes unlocks a world of creative possibilities, allowing you to craft stunning environments in a fraction of the time.

Getting started:

World Blender requires Blender 4.1 and some familiarity with Geometry Nodes. It's designed for users who have a basic understanding of this powerful tool.

Installation:

World Blender installs seamlessly as an asset library. Simply download the latest version, unzip the downloaded file and add the folder containing the Blend files to Blender's asset library. You'll then have all the tools at your fingertips.

Note: The Simulation nodes are heavy tasks so you may experience temporary freezes while the simulation is running.

Learning the Ropes:

To help you master World Blender, I offer a dedicated YouTube playlist filled with in-depth tutorials that guide you through every step of the process.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvgg0AvdksuLaJ_kgWOHbymMSIeiC0TB7

Stepping into the World:

World Blender comes in two versions:

World Blender Basics (Free): Get your feet wet with a basic set of tools to create stunning landscapes. While not as diverse as the Pro version, it's a fantastic way to experience the power of World Blender and gain a glimpse into what the Pro version offers.

A simple node graph to create a high detailed landscape using World Blender Basics (free)

Dry desert - Created with World Blender Basics

World Blender Pro (Full Version): Unlock the full potential of World Blender with a vast library of node groups for crafting a vast variety of landscapes.

World Blender Pro can create a large variety of landscapes

2K landscape created using World Blender Pro

Unleashing Your Creativity

World Blender empowers you to create breathtaking landscapes with a range of powerful features:

Procedural rock generation

Utilize fractal textures to create stunningly realistic rock formations that add depth and character to your scene.

Erosion simulation

Breathe life into your landscapes by simulating the natural erosion process on mountains, adding a touch of realism that elevates your scenes.

Hydro simulation

Take control of water with hydro simulation, allowing you to create flowing rivers, frozen lakes, and even simulate the melting of snow.

Custom displacement

Mold your landscapes exactly as you envision them. Use custom objects or curves to precisely control the displacement of the terrain.

Texturing

Texturing Made Easy: Leverage erosion and hydro simulations to generate valuable data sets like flow, wear, and dirt. World Blender offers a suite of shader nodes that utilize this data to create stunning and natural-looking textures.

Quick rock, quick debris and quick dirt shaders were combined to generate this high detailed landscape texture

Artistic sky texture

Craft beautiful skies with a procedurally generated sky texture node. Take greater control over Blender's built-in sky texture for a truly personalized touch.

World Blender empowers you to bring your landscape visions to life. With its intuitive workflow, powerful features, and free Basic version, there's no better way to craft epic and natural-looking environments in Blender. Dive in and explore the possibilities – your breathtaking landscapes await.

Landscapes I created using World Blender Pro

Update 2024.1

In his update, I added several quality of life improvements to World Blender

• Displacement nodes now have unlimited fractal
• Added an Edge mask node to let you mask off the edges of the landscape
• New landscapes are now centered by default
• Displacement X/Y offset relative to texture size, you no longer have to drag the slider a lot to get the texture to move.
• Allow dirt gain/loss in Particle Erosion node
• Added new presets

Update 2024-07-01

Added nodes for World Blender Pro:

• Particle Erosion: The new heart of World Blender. This node is the high quality erosion node will bring your landscapes to the next level.
• Crop Landscape: Gives you the ability to crop your landscape.
• Tile landscape: An experimental node to make your landscape tileable.
• Quick Dirt (Particle erosion): Utilize the data channels produced by the Particle Erosion node to generate a realistic dirt texture for your landscape

Deprecated nodes:

• Erosion: This is the first erosion node that World Blender had to offer, however, it is now outdated.
• Particle Flow: This node uses an old algorithm which is very slow. The new particle erosion node is faster and produces a higher quality flow map.
• Quick Dirt: This node uses the data of the old erosion node.
• Quick Shader: There is no size that fit all, this node fails to work an a wide variety of landscape.

Improved performance:

Blend Landscape, Blend Height Channels, Resample Landscape and Convexity nodes are now significantly faster, they now cost a fraction of time as before.

Update 2023-12-07

World Blender Basics:

• You now have the option to create the landscape at the center of the world.
• Added a height clamp node to let you cut off a certain height level of the landscape
• Selector utility nodes in shader editor now have the option to use custom Normal/Height map
• The old erosion node is now fully available for World Blender Basics
• Added preview of World Blender Pro nodes to give you an overview of what is available in World Blender Pro

World Blender Pro:

Contains all the extra features of World Blender basics plus the following:

• Added a Cell terrace node
• Added a Particle flow node that simulates the trail of rain particles and produces a high quality flow map.
• Added 8 more presets, inspired by real world locations.
• The experimental rock generating nodes are now somewhat usable, however, more development is still needed.

Update 2023-11-24

Changed "World Blender Pro.blend" to "landscape nodes main.blend" to fix the path issue with the presets

Update 2023-11-22

An update for World Blender Pro

• Added a new erosion model, achieve higher detail on the same resolution landscape. The new erosion model is better for large landscapes (larger than 1 km) while the old erosion model is better for small landscapes (smaller than 1 km), both are available at your finger tips
• Quick rock, quick debris, quick dirt shaders
• Artistic sky texture
• 4 landscape presets
• Adjusted default values for various nodes to achieve better results right out of the box.
• Bug fixes
• Many other minor improvements

Update for Blender 4.0

Geometry node updates:

• Improved Erosion and Hydro simulation nodes, now up to 10% faster, allows unlimited iterations and support unlimited resolution thanks to the new "Repeat Zone" of Blender 4.0
• Added Advanced convexity node: Generate high quality convexity map for the landscape
• Added a node to generate texture from curve object
• Added 12 examples for the Pro version
• Added a free version + 3 examples
• Added a Scatter node to let you quickly scatter objects such as trees and rocks onto your landscape
• Added a Simulation Data node to let you quickly extract the data after the Erosion or Hydro simulation node and use them for other purposes.

Shader node update:

• Improved Landscape Data node
• Quick Shader node: Quickly visualize your landscape

Other updates:

• All of World Blender nodes have been made into assets with proper icons and categories. You no longer have to look for the node in a messy menu, Life is much easier.
• Adjusted default values to produce decent result right out of the box

Update 2023-04-08

• Improved erosion node, added Rock Break parameter that allows you to create sharp rocks. Also added Debris loss parameter to let the debris be lost over time.
• Added a Hydro Simulation node to simulate short term water such as flowing, freezing, melting and snow sliding.
• Added Height Fog shader node to Pro version- Create a layer of volumetric fog that is denser at the ground level and falls off along the height.
• Added Cloud shader node to Pro version - Creates volumetric clouds at a selected height level and mimic the curvature of the earth
• Improved Landscape Data shader node