Intuitive and Streamlined User Interface

Professional users of any of the mainstream 3D packages will find that WB is easy to master.

River and water wizard UI is easy to use and creates attractive effects.

All manipulations are streamlined, offering right-click menus that switch in between, for example, rotation and move. The same approach is used for cameras, skeletons and other objects.

Simplified Navigation in viewports that supports hot keys in combination with mouse movements. You can now navigate in the viewport while manipulating objects.

Buttons and selecting objects are standardized with other major 3D packages.

Scripts display property pages in the Property Editor where you can easily edit their parameters.

You can write your own scripts by following simple conventions and provide them with a comprehensive interface and even enable them for the Variator.

Edge anti-aliasing in Max is now treated in a consistent way in the composite images, leaving no “bleeding edges”.

Fast Render Speed

WorldBuilder renders millions of polygons faster than any other modeling and rendering program.

Levels of Detail automatically optimize background in a scene for maximum render speed. Render speeds for large scenes 2 to 10 times as fast!

All rendering in editing modes (bounding box, wire-frame and skeleton) is now based on OpenGL.

All editing operations involving redraw of complex objects and complex scenes will be much faster on systems with 3D accelerators. Even without a 3D accelerated video board the OpenGL mode gives a significant increase in speed.

Rain and Snow

Rain and snow are now available – works with wind wizards to create animated effects.

Rain collides with standing water realistically.

Large Scene Support Area

World grids can now be 4 times as large. The maximum size grid is now 8192x8192!

Now all operations with areas can be performed through standard viewports.

Specialized skeletons define area boundaries. You can create and edit them in exactly the same manner as ordinary skeletons.

You can use any viewport and any projection for the editing of areas.

Areas have controllable feathering.. The feathering can affect boundaries and placing conditions and also works with fractalizers.

Areas can be created either on native WB meshes or on mesh objects imported from Max and LightWave.

So-called bilinear meshes can also be used as terrain surface. Properly colored grass on such meshes can simulate fur.

Exciting Waterfalls

WorldBuilder’s great waterfalls algorithms and interface have been improved once again.

You can start using WB immediately because of its simple drag-n-drop interface and a huge number of ready-for-use components, even if you are not a professional in 3D graphics.

All operations changing the scene and most operations affecting the UI state now have multiple undo and redo functions.

Improved Rendering, Supports Translucency and Anti-Aliasing

The new rendering engine supports translucent objects (a-buffered rendering)

Translucent objects can be rendered in an arbitrary order and still give the correct results.

Operates not only with depth but also with the alpha channel in a way that is similar to layers in 2D packages.

Performs anti-aliasing of object edges (aa-buffered rendering).

100% compatible with previous WorldBuilder (2.2) rendering.

It not only takes care of transparency but also works on a sub-pixel level to render objects' edges with perfect anti-aliasing.

Rendering time for a given scene quality has been greatly improved.

Max Communicators supports use of a- and aa-buffer for composite rendering with Max. This allows usage of WB for volumetric lighting and fog in Max scenes, rendering of Max objects under WorldBuilder water and more.

Edge anti-aliasing in Max is now treated in a consistent way in the composite images, leaving no “bleeding edges”.

Open GL support

All rendering in editing modes (bounding box, wire-frame and skeleton) is now based on OpenGL.

All editing operations involving redraw of complex objects and complex scenes will be much faster on systems with 3D accelerators. Even without a 3D accelerated video board the OpenGL mode gives a significant increase in speed.

Undo-redo

All operations changing the scene and most operations affecting the UI state now have multiple undo and redo functions.

Improved Max Communicator

WorldBuilder Professional is so closely integrated with Max and Viz that you may consider it as a plug-in for these popular professional packages.

WorldBuilder Professional can run simultaneously with Max (or Viz) on the same system and exchange data in run time through a Communicator, bypassing file import and export.

Two packages can share the same cameras with animation, light sources, meshes and gizmos. Shared lights automatically generate composite shadows.

The rendering in any of the packages evokes rendering in the other package and the result is composed automatically.

Besides normal z-buffer composition of the images it also composes reflections and shadows, giving results that are by far better than with any traditional z-buffer composer.

Improved Shadows

Shadows from light sources now have soft edges, this is controllable from the light source properties panel.

Shadow interpolation algorithms now produce fewer artifacts.

Point lights now cast shadows

New Shaders and Filters

Exposure correction (currently it is an Atmospheric effect) simulates non-linear behavior of sensitive media in cameras and camcorders. Rendering with this filter gives a much more natural look for the scene.

The Auto level post-process filter enhances the colors and, together with exposure correction, increases the realistic look of the images.

New ripples for the water help to produce better results with water objects.

The Caustics Shader simulates not only bright highlights but also dispersion (non-uniform diffraction) of light.

The Variator -- Variation Wizard for Sky, Plants and Scripts

The Variator - provides you with a new easy interface to generate random variations for complex models such as skies, plants and script-based models.

Quickly create hundreds of unique plants or trees for complex scenes and fly-bys.

Select one or more of the randomly generated variations to create a new batch of variations based on the selected model(s).

The Variator interacts with the library window by using a drag-n-drop method and you can drag-n-drop between multiple Variator windows.

Plant Editor; Plants Blow in the Wind

Plant Editor allows you to draw a plant from scratch just like you would draw a spline or skeleton line.

After free-hand drawing the trunk and branches you can manipulate them, deforming the geometry in several ways.

Also you can add billboard foliage. There will be more editing capabilities for the Plant Editor in the commercial release. Plants generated using this method can be loaded into Sony PS-2 applications for real time viewing.

Plants can blow in the wind via a few simple controls. 3D plants use perfect LOD (level of detail reduction) on camera distance. LOD is "animation safe" and will never flicker.

Grass

New parameter for blade width was introduced. The blades also now have sharp tops.

We have improved the scaling of grass together with terrain to eliminate the need for additional adjustments.

Lightwave, Unit Conversion, and New File Format Support

Due to better support of LWO, LWO2 and 3DS formats in WB4 support of materials and smoothing groups on imported objects is dramatically improved.

Supports LightWave z-buffer compositing 3d-compositing, with easy ways of making shadows and reflections match between both software, and proper inter-occlusion based on distance from the camera.

Support of obj and rgb file formats has been added.

WB now allows unit conversion. Max Communicator plug-in automatically detects and adjusts units for both programs.