Area Terrafector Island

Terrafectors were commonly used in WCS v4.x to build roads, streams, and other such effects. While terrafectors were fairly straight forward and easy to understand, Area Terrafectors seem to be used much less. In WCS v5 there are some new features that make Area Terrafectors a very valuable tool in creating and editing WCS terrain. In this tutorial we'll go through the steps necessary to create an island completely out of Area Terrafectors. You will notice that there is more than one way to create terrain using WCS's Area Terrafectors.

Open up WCS if you haven't already and click continue when the version screen comes up. Select file: New (or CTRL + N) and type the name of the new project into the project field and click on create & save. When WCS asks if you want to import some data click on No.

The first thing we're going to need for this project is some terrain to create our vectors on and for the Area Terrafectors to displace. We'll create this terrain with the terrain generator. Click on Data: Terrain Generator (or ALT + F) to bring up the terrain generator window. The terrain Generator can be tricky to get good natural looking terrain out of. I've spent many an hour adjusting the settings and generating terrain before I became somewhat familiar with what the controls do. It's still mostly a hit or miss operation for me. I would suggest spending some time getting familiar with what the different settings do. For this project we'll use the settings:

Don't worry about the name of the dem too much. This dem will be used to setup the island, but will be too small for a complete render. Once we get the island setup we'll replace it with a much wider piece of ground.