WorldBuilder 4 Basics: Part 3, Introduction

Welcome to Part 3 of our 4-part WorldBuilder Basics tutorial.

In this tutorial, we will continue building the scene we started in Parts 1 and 2. We will add water, and set the placing conditions for the material and vegetation so that they will be consistent with the water level.

We will use OpenGL rendering mode to speed up moving the water object around. For even faster rendering, we will hide all the areas containing grass and vegetation.

NOTE: The tutorial is designed to be used with the downloadable demo version of WorldBuilder 4. Some features such as scene and rendered image saving are disabled in this version. In order to follow along with the tutorial example scene files, each of the tutorial's four parts are available for download.

Select Areas 2 through 4 by Ctrl+clicking them. Also you can Shift+click for a continuous selection, just as you might do in Windows Explorer. Right-click on the selection. It will bring up a pop-up menu with common operations that are applicable to all objects in the selection. Select Hide. When hidden, objects appear grayed out in the Scene Tree. Render the scene with OpenGL rendering.

OpenGL mode is very convenient for many editing tasks, like adjusting the location of objects. In this mode you can see just enough of the scene even for very precise tuning.

Use the Creation Toolbar to create a Lake object. It is a simple square water surface with reflection, transparency and ripples. Immediately, you will see the blue surface, which represents the Lake object. We want to move the water slightly lower. Select the Move tool. Refresher: You can do this by using the top toolbar or by right-clicking in the Viewport which brings up a pop-up menu.

If dragging with the Manipulator does not allow you to move the object with enough precision, then you can always enter a numerical value for the object's Move property. For our scene, we're using a value of approximately -4.31 (meters).