November Entry - A Vulcan Winter

[Greason Wolfe]

After waging a battle with myself over whether to enter this month's challenge or not, I've broken down and decided to enter. Hopefully I've got enough of a start on this that even should things become hectic at work or at home (November and December are busy months on both of those fronts), I'll still have enough time to finish this map up. The good news is that I've already finished up the basic landform and cycled it through a bit of erosion to give it some "flavor."

The foundation for this map comes from the area in which I grew up. A year or so ago, I snagged some topographical information for said area as reference material for a short story (well, maybe more like a novella) that I was (still am) writing. With the decision to enter the challenge made, I spent a few hours developing a contour map based on part of that information and set it up for a bit of modifying in Wilbur before sending it to Terragen for an initial render.

The original topographical information I snagged covered an area of approximately 1035 square kilometers. Trying to detail that by hand in the form of a contour map would have taken me the entire month, so I'm only using a small portion of that area, approximately 67 square kilometers, centered roughly between the two lakes I spent most of my boyhood years fishing and swimming in so that I can include some of the finer details and, hopefully, get the "destruction" to show through. If and/or when time permits, I'll build up the more expansive form of the map such that the entire area (of the story, that is) can be depicted.

The only real problem I face now is in figuring out how I'm going to show the destruction in the form of the map rather than having to describe it with some form of text. As to the nature of that destruction, I'll get to that in the next couple of posts. For now, I wanted to get something up and running, so to speak. My only real concern with these initial results is that the elevations are a bit too exaggerated and giving the mountains/hills too sharp of a look. That, fortunately, will be an easy fix. I may also need to work in a bit more blur as there are still some areas that are looking a little too terraced and/or sharp for my tastes. I'll try another render with a more constrained height range as I watch the new "V" series premier and see how things look after that before anymore blurring, though, as it is possible that a change in the height range will fix the terracing/sharpness issue.

GW

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