WHAT IS MOJOWORLD?
MojoWorld offers a unique ‘procedural planet
maker’, with videogame-like controls to ‘fly’ over
an Earth-sized fractal-generated planet. You can
learn the basics in an afternoon, it’s fun, and
there’s still nothing quite like it. It’s also very
deep, but it hides the complexity well.
However, this software is old. Really old, so it’s
often dismissed out-of-hand — despite running
fine under Windows 7, 8 and 10 and having no
problem in making a big 4k render with a nicely
retro ‘1970s sci-fi paperback-cover’ feel to it.
It is also ideal for quickly making pictures of vast
desert and treeless terrains. Such renders make
fine scenic backplates for rendering characters
and props with more up-to-date software.
MojoWorld is also still useful as a quickstart for
matte painters to overpaint, producing a nice
painterly look on its quickest draft render settings
(3 minutes for a 4k render, provided you don’t
have lots of water or OBJs in the picture).
Moon presets were a weak point of the software,
but real moons can now be easy had from NASA’s
public-domain pictures, and pasted in with
Photoshop. The Photoshop plugins
‘LunarCell’ (Moons) and ‘Glitterato’ (Star-fields)
were widely used when MojoWorld was popular,
along with Flood (now the excellent Flood 2) for
adding scene-reflective surface water.
MojoWorld lost the race with Vue, and has not
been officially available for about a decade now.
Many consider it ‘abandonware’ and there is a
demo version of 3.1 on Archive.org (but note that
has now time-expired). However, used copies
may occasionally be had on eBay (version 1.0 is
currently listed there), and a thorough Web
search will uncover useful online resources for
3.1.1. The best video quickstart tutorial is
TikiRussy’s 15 minute introduction at YouTube.
The Renderosity MojoWorld forum is still active
and there is currently some talk there of
crowdfunding a community-purchase from the
estate of maker Ken Musgrave — so please help
them out with that if you can. An actively
developed 64-bit multi-core open-source
MojoWorld 4 would be a software wonder for the
2020s!
MojoWorld pros:
● Quick ‘random
planet generator’.
● Superb materials
blending in terrain
transition zones.
● Poser 6 .PZ3 prop
import (added in version 3.1).
● MojoWorld 3.1.1 still runs and is quite
stable on Windows 8 and 10.
● A 500-page manual as a structured and
searchable Windows Help file.
● Atmospheres, nice clouds, rivers, all as
presets.
● A variety of one-click ‘random’ buttons,
including several for camera placement.
● Fun, with ‘flight sim-like’ world navigation.
● Light use of PC resources / memory while
rendering (only one CPU core is used).
● Does 360 VR (renders as 6 x ‘cube’ tiles,
then you convert these for Facebook 360 with
either Pano2VR 6.x or PTGui 11.2).
MojoWorld cons:
● Old now, and was never updated to take
advantage of multi-processor CPUs or 64-bit.
● Distant ridges and horizons look razor
sharp, even in mist and fog, and thus may
need to be softened manually in Photoshop.
● Not a fast renderer, especially if a scene
has some imported polygonal models or
reflective water in lakes and pools.
● It’s more difficult than you might think to
find a really good scene by using the
‘random’ camera position generator. The
best strategy seems to be to find a moon on
the horizon, zoom the camera up to 10,000
feet, then fly away from the moon (keeping it
centred in the picture) until one sees a likely
spot below, then drop down and nudge in.Top inset picture: The old MojoWorld logo.