Eyar Madhri Island Nation by Greason Wolfe

[Greason Wolfe]

This is the first of four islands that make up the Eyar Madhri nation. It took me about a day (using a modification of the techniques outlined by waldronate in this tutorial) to build the base terrain for this initial render in Terragen. At first, I was going to build all the islands as a single file for rendering in Terragen, but ultimately opted to build each island individually for maximum detail. Eventually, once I’ve done a final render of each island, I’ll bring them together in a single map that will ultimately become part of a world map.

I’ve still got quite a bit of work to do with this specific map (i.e. finalizing rivers and lakes, adding forests and other significant terrain features, tweaking the elevation file), but I expect that things will move along at a fairly good pace until I’m ready to start working on the other islands.

As a bit of background, the Eyar Madhri nation is based on a mixture of Amazonian and Norse (Valkyrie) mythologies with a little bit of Descolada Virus (Orson Scott Card’s “Speaker for the Dead”) stirred in to complete the underlying religious beliefs and cultural structure of the inhabitants. I’ll save the details of those beliefs and the cultural structure for another time, but if you are familiar with the afore mentioned mythologies and Orson’s book, it will, hopefully, give you an idea of where things are headed.

On a side note, it’s good to be feeling productive again. It’s been over a year since the last time I posted anything other than an occasional comment here or there. Much of that year has been taken up by work, and, to be honest, a lack of motivation and/or drive to do any mapping work. Hopefully I’ll be able to maintain both the motivation and drive to see this project through to the end.

GW