In the Box
I was a bit surprised by the lightness of the box when World Builder arrived, as the only written documentation was a 29-page booklet. Being new to this product I was a bit concerned I'd have trouble mastering the nuances of this terrain creation tool. As it turned out, it was a good size accompaniment to this product. It covered everything I needed to know to get busy creating very quickly. The built in help is great, containing tutorials, and explanations of all the tools, and how to use them. There are also some great tutorials on their web site to give you a glimpse of the capabilities of this release. A more comprehensive manual is currently under development, which will be available for download in PDF format. You also get 2 CD's. The program itself, plus a bonus plant thematic library disk 1 - chock full of additional plant libraries! Very nice.

Installation
No problems installing on my P3-850 Dell laptop with 256MB of Ram running Win ME. Registering was required to disable a 30-day trial period. This required filling in the CD serial number, answering the standard contact info forms, and waiting a minuet for the email with the authorization code and instructions to license it. A warning appears reminding you when you are running out of the 30-day trial in case, like me, you've procrastinated long enough.

Interface
The Interface is the customizable 4 view working screens, with one reserved for your tool box of textures, objects, scenes, terrains, trees, and more. The right hand screen section contains the project manager, where you control the parameters of all the elements in your scene. The tool buttons on the bottom right are an exact match of Max, used for viewpoint control. The obligatory, and very useful top menu completes the interface. As I gained familiarity with it I began to appreciate its very efficient design.

Creation Process
In World Builder 3 Pro you develop your 3D terrain by drawing skeleton lines onto one of your view ports. These skeleton lines are then skinned to the landscape based on parameters for Evolution, and roughness. By adding, and fractalizing your skeleton lines, you are able to control the over-all look of shape of your terrain. You could also start by importing real-world DEM files. With your terrain formed, you then add in your textures, trees, flowers, grass, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, other 3D objects, compound sky, 3D clouds, atmosphere, and camera(s).

Control where your textures appear.

One of the many control panels to control your forest.

The creation process is quite powerful; giving you control over virtually every blade of grass in the scene if that's the level of detail you are after. With an OpenGL camera open, visual updates are quick enough to make edits quite manageable, before taking the time to wait for a render. You can render any view screen in various levels of detail - bounding box, skeleton, wire frame, OpenGL, Draft, Preview, and Production Rendering. Rendering times depend upon the complexity of the scenes. As with all 3D programs, rendering speeds are always slower than you'd like, however WB3 does allow network, and multiprocessor rendering, to share the workload. Memory management seemed fine, though I did need to close the program down, and reboot a couple of times as my system resources maxed out. You'll almost certainly need 512 MB or even 1GB of RAM if you are planning on swapping back and forth between WB3 and 3D Studio Max. Animation is refreshingly simple to control. Click the AutoKeyFrame, slide the timeframe slider, change some parameters, such as camera location, and World Builder smoothly tweens the movement. Virtually every parameter is Keyframeable, allowing your imagination to be the judge - I've never seen a tree pick up roots and stroll around the forest - but hey why not? Rivers flow, clouds move across the sky, and the surf laps upon the beaches based upon physical world parameters such as wind direction, and speed.

In conclusion: There is little doubt that AnimaTek World Builder 3.0 Professional is the leader in World Building, terrain generation. It's ease of use, animation, plant library, and beautiful rendering make it a powerful application on it's own. Combined with other 3D platforms such as Max, Maya, and Lightwave - WB3 Pro would quickly become one of your most used utilities. I have no hesitation to recommend this product to anyone that wants to produce beautifully realistic 3D landscapes.