December Entry: New Dundock

[Greason Wolfe]

@ Ravs : I thought about drawing them in by hand, but, as it happens, I figured out what I was doing wrong with the overlay, so the next update should show the rivers properly with the projection I want to use. As for the coloring, I'm using the "Show Other Shader" feature instead of showing altitude, and using the climate overlay posted above. It doesn't follow the contours as much as the altitude shader does, but, as I mentioned, it still needs a bit of tweaking before it is finalized.

I haven't had much of a chance to work on this over the weekend as I'd hoped. We had some incidents at work that required my attention, but I'm on MY weekend now, so I should be able to work on this some. I've got a few more tweaks to work out, and I've got to make a final decision on presentation, but as it stands now, all systems are a go and I expect to have this wrapped up with plenty of time to spare.

GW

[ravells]

Cool, can't wait to see those rivers! I saw that you were using the 'other shader' option, but I still get that altitude (or it might be rainfall?) banding. I used your shader and got this result zoomed in on a random FT map. Yours don't seem to be that 'altitude' dependant, although I guess one could take it into photoshop and do some clone stamping to break up the obvious contour lines. The other thing I found is that those lovely tree textures don't show up..the colours are much more uniform.

[waldronate]

The climate image shader in FT point-samples the image to get its data. Basically, it just puts the temperature index along one axis and the rainfall axis across the other and the grabs the pixel closest to that intersection. The larger your input image, the smaller an area that each pixel will control. There will always be some banding if you zoom in far enough.

As with so many things in FT, it wasn't really intended for close-in work.

[ravells]

Ah thanks Joe...what's the largest input image that FT can take for the shader?

[waldronate]

There isn't a limit in the code, but there should be a practical upper limit imposed by the OS or 32-bit address space. Figure 4k by 4k or so (possibly higher or lower depending on what's already in memory). The way you'll know that you've exceeded the limit is that the software will crash, so save often when experimenting.

[Greason Wolfe]

Joe hit it on the head there, both the banding and the lack of "texture" are caused by the point sampling. I haven't tried using a larger image yet (mostly because I was under the impression that it had to be a specific size) but one other solution is to blur the climate image to some degree. You'll still end up with some banding issues depending on how far you zoom in on the surface, but the more you blur, the closer you should be able to get.

I am having a bit more success with the rivers now, but I'm still pushing towards a specific look. My problem before was that I had done a few vertical flips between FTPro and Wilbur and had my river overlay flipped the wrong way. Things are, however, beginning to work out the way I had hoped, so I should be able to include significant landlocked bodies of water as well, and they'll even follow the rules. Wooohooo.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Well, it hasn't been the best "weekend" for my wolfish-self.

As I was working on this, I discovered a continuity problem in my land masses. Apparently, while filling in the landlocked bodies of water in Wilbur, I missed one edge of the file, and that resulted in a nasty looking straight continental edge in several areas. So it was back to the drawing board so to speak, but it's all good, gave me a chance to tweak the continental masses and add in some island chains. Then it was the whole Wilbur thing again to fill in areas that needed to be filled, smooth things out and cycle through some erosion just to pretty things up a bit.

I also spent some time tweaking the climate overlay image, and it is a little better, but I'm still not 100% happy with it just yet. For now, however, it will do. The big push today has been to catch up to where I had hoped to be with this, thus I've spent some time working on the rivers. FTPro's river function and the Wagner IV projection don't play well together, so I've basically had to draw the rivers in by hand using an overlay. Had to experiment with that a bit to effectively taper the rivers the way they should be and make sure they settle in where they are supposed to. All in all, they aren't looking too bad, but I imagine I will likely tweak them a bit more once I've finished up the major editing process.

I'm still debating the layout, but, in the process of playing around with things, stumbled upon a new technique that may push me towards an inset of a particular area that will, if the technique works well across the board, give me some really good texture results. Will just have to wait and see. For now, here's a bit of an update, though it only shows the "world" map.

GW

### Latest WIP ###

[Greason Wolfe]

Ahhh, finally have the rivers finished. While I wanted them to be visible, I also wanted them to remain somewhat subtle. I think I've managed to accomplish that. For the more detailed map, I made them a bit more prominent. Sadly, at least when it came to the world map, my hope to include the major lakes just didn't work out. I'll take another stab at it next time around. For now, however, I think I'll only try to tie them in to the detailed map.

I'm still pretty happy with the progress so far, and I've finalized the overall layout. I had intended to include a "view from space," but had a change of heart and opted to go with a detailed insert instead. I'm going to experiment with the detailed portion of the map to see if I can lay in a bit more texture. Beyond that, it should mostly be a matter of labeling everything that needs to be labeled and slapping in the "Technical Readout" mumbo-jumbo.

Things are looking good for me to be able to finish this one up! Wooooohooooo!

GW

### Latest WIP ###

[Greason Wolfe]

Well . . . Progress of sorts. I'm just not sure if it's positive progress or not. Took my first stab at trying to add in some texture to the detailed view. Some of it I'm fairly happy with, and some of it . . . Well, I'm just not sure about it yet. I might try taking another stab at it, but if I'm still not happy with the results, I'll probably end up working with the more atlas style look and start slapping the labels in.

GW

[ravells]

It looks beautiful, GW, but the top pic is quite dark (on my monitor anyway).