MojoWorld Generator 2

MojoWorld, originally released a year ago, takes an alternative approach. At its most basic, it's a landscape-creation package - and yet it's so much more than that, too. You see, MojoWorld doesn't just create discrete terrains (or 'stage sets') that are designed to be seen from a particular angle - but an entire planet, which you can view from miles out in space right up to six inches from the surface. The terrain is a continuous mass, created using a specialised kind of displacement mapping on a sphere. Thus, MojoWorld doesn't use polygons as such. Everything is procedurally created via fractal algorithms rendered on the fly - and because fractals are essentially infinite, the closer you get to the surface, the more detail you get to see.

Fractals are MojoWorld's bread and butter. Everything, including surface textures (the actual shape of the landscape), materials (surface properties), water waves, cloud density, star fields and planetary rings, rely on fractals for their properties. In techy terms, each texture begins with a 2D basis function, which determines its basic shape. These range from simple Perlin noise to complex number-crunchers, such as Voronoi, but all are derived from simple fractal maths.

The basis function in turn drives a fractal function, which distorts and complicates the shape into a more interesting pattern. Again, there are various types, from the reasonably simple and uniform MonoFractal to more interesting shapes, such as the Mountain Fractal. Just to make things more interesting, you can also add 'domain distortion' along the way, which skews and pinches the result.

You can combine up to four of these fractals leafs using Photoshop-style operations such as Add, Maximum and Minimum. A specialised Blend function also enables you to use another entire fractal leaf to mix two together. But that's just the start, because each component of a fractal is governed by its own input and output curves. Altering this curve with the simple editor enables you to map values to any other arbitrary value - just like the Curves function in Photoshop. This in itself presents countless possibilities, once you understand exactly what the curves are doing.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that you need a PhD just to understand this lot, but that's not true. If you've ever used Bryce's Deep Texture Editor, you're already halfway there - except that MojoWorld does things in a much clearer way.

This is partly thanks to its stylish, custom-designed UI. It's a sleekly minimalist affair, thoroughly consistent if esoteric at times. Much of your time is spent in the Texture or Material editors, which display the fractal leaf along with a 2D or 3D greyscale representation. You can jump to (or stow) any editor window at any time - a useful touch when you're delving down deep into a tortuous nest of fractals.

Most of the main display consists of the real-time renderer, which manfully tries to show as much detail of your planet as possible. Movement is easy, using the arrow keys and, as with the venerable Vistapro, you can walk, fly, or orbit round your planet to find an interesting spot to render. When you've found one, you can store and recall it at any time afterwards. The more mathematically minded can also work by longitude and latitude.

As you might expect, MojoWorld's renderer isn't the speediest - and raytracing really bogs things down. However, like the rest of the package, it's enormously flexible, giving total control over resolution, terrain detail, anti-aliasing, shadows and so on. Animation is possible, too, but currently limited to recording your path as you walk or fly around - you can't create camera paths or animate other aspects such as skies or water. Both static images and animations can be queued up and batch-rendered, a vital facility given the enormous rendering times for high-resolution images.

Many applications pretend they're unique, but in MojoWorld's case this is refreshingly true. There really is nothing else like it out there, so getting to know it can be a difficult business. Put in the effort, though, and you'll be rewarded by an infinite array of beautiful worlds. Is it useful? That depends on you. Is it perfect? Of course not.
Is it fun? Oh yes. Most definitely.