The Valley

[LonewandererD]

The title will changed as soon as I can think of something better.

Anyway, inspired by the work of Jykke, Pasis and Yandor I decided to try my hand at using Geocontrol 2. I've made a small mountain valley area that i'm exporting to photoshop, not really sure where to go from there but experiment is always fun. Until I've got something more interesting than a blakc and white heightmap i'll post something, for now I only have a 3d veiw of the valley taken from Geocontrol 2. The large central area is going be hilly farmlands and open grasses with a few rivers cutting through. The area in the southwest is going be a great lake and the areas in the northern mountain pass and the expanse in the southeast will be forested.

More to come soon, hopefully.

-D-

[Radu Vlad]

Hey Wand, good luck with da work. Seeing as u started to use heightmaps on this project, can u share some tips bout things u found out to work in drewing heightpams my hand? I find that rather complicated (tedious at best), and id love to know some easier ways to make those (getting them from the net or something excluded) I tried something in 3ds max, a while ago, but it goes a bit slow, i prefer to work in photoshop on maps whn i have time

[LonewandererD]

I drew my height map in Gecontrol 2, there's a free demo of it on their website, I learn to use it by listening to their online tuts and by following Jykke's "desert river" tut here on the Guild, you can find it in search. As for tips, I have none, I'm still very new to heightmaps.

-D-

[ravells]

Wow, that geocontrol looks fantastic! Just been to the site. Looking forward to seeing how you get on, Lone!

[Radu Vlad]

The stuff on their site looks imba, should give it a try, might flesh out some bits of my big map with it (if i manage to start it lol )

[Yandor]

Yeah good luck, and looking forward to what you come out with, I've experimented enough with it, I know how much of a headache it can provide especially when you get a good result and can't duplicate it cause you forgot to save it.... ugh.... haha, but so you know for future reference, I tilted the 3d image to be a complete top down view, and just did a print screen and pasted it into photoshop.... I think pasis imports it a different way but similar effect.

[LonewandererD]

Fortunately Yandor I've been saving like crazy, and having already exported a top-down black and white veiw into photoshop, I'm just having some annoyances with getting the layers to multiply onto the heigtmap properly, those grey areas are causing me some problems, they make the land a little too dark. I'll just fiddle around with the brightness and contrast, maybe that'll help.

-D-

[Steel General]

Might have to give that a try one of these days...

[Yandor]

hahaha yeah, I know how you feel -D-, one thing I did, instead of multiple is Hue and Color. Once I did that and got the "basic" of what I liked, I flattened the layers and started to work from there. So after that I could put in other color layers, like multiply, overlay etc to bring out other colors. However one problem I found were the shadows, all I ended up doing, was using the healing/stamp brush and just used similar colors that looked like shadows, but were much much lighter.... Hopefully some of this might help, but who knows! you may end up doing much better of a job then me.

[LonewandererD]

Okay, I've reworked the layout of the valley. I changed the shaping of the mountains to make them look more natural and to make them slope more gently and thus give me a more "mountain slopes" look rather than the "canyon walls" look I had before. The pic below is shot from the southwest from what I'd expect noon in the northern hemisphere would look like, but of course this won't be on my final map and is just me playing around with Geocontrol . Before I go on I have a question for the guild. If this map where about 3600x3600 pics would a scale of 30 pixels = 1 mile be reasonable?

-D-