Learning How Heightfields Can Help Your Work
Hi Everyone,
This forum is loaded with some really nice cartography renderings done in Photoshop and other 2d programs, but have you considered procedural terrain generation via heightfields? There are various ways of generating the heightfield data. However, doing it by hand in a 2D paint program leads to a destructive process; it can be laborious to reshape a terrain due to the additional work that needs to be done to "tie it all together."
I'm an experienced user of World Machine; an extremely popular procedural heightfield generation tool that can be used to create high quality terrains for film, video games, or 2d. I've used World Machine in various projects, some professional and others personal (Alpine Terrain Pack, Rocky Hills Terrain Pack, and Desert Terrain Pack).
You can do a lot with a top-down projected heightfield, but World Machine can present a steep learning curve for newcomers. Other video series' simply gloss over everything and expect you to fill in the blanks. This is why I recently developed my own Introduction to World Machine video tutorial series.
In this series, you'll gain a solid understanding of how World Machine operates, how all the nodes work, and even construct and texture a nice Alpine Terrain using some cool techniques all inside World Machine. Once completed, you'll construct the splat map and export all the data to the Unity 5 game engine. However, you can just as easily bring the imagery right into Photoshop, Gimp, or pretty much any image editing software and composite the terrain data as you see fit. You will have a "non-destructive" workflow by being able to go back and adjust that mountain, lake, stream, and just re-render.
Just as an example, I did a quick 5 minute terrain and redered it from top-down in World Machine just to give you a simple example of output:
Obviously this isn't a finished map, per se, but this is a simple example of the output you could expect. You can divide up the data too; I can easily render the lighting layer, the color layer, the heightfield, mountain masks, water, anything, to a texture and take it further in another program. The best part is that you don't need a commercial license to get started. World Machine Basic is available for download free and only has a limit of 512x512 renders. Using the Basic Edition is a good way to follow along in the course.
Right now the course is 50% off on my GumRoad webpage! Take a look over the course, what is offered, and feel free to ask any questions you have. Maybe I can help create any troublesome landscape features you need.
Thanks for your consideration!
-Pete
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