Reply With QuoteBeautiful in every step. Everything done with such great care, I'm a fan. I hope you will do a PS tutorial at some point
P.S. History of your land is equally thrilling.
A man after my own heart! My worldbuilding project is coming up on ten years, but I started when I was quite young and the continents have undergone some pretty cataclysmic revisions since then. I have a soft spot for hyper-realism and suffice it to say this is one of my favorite maps on the boards.
I'm a bit late to the beginning of the thread, but I wanted to ask if you'd be willing to share your method for developing the coastlines. Firstly, well done! They're the best coastlines I've seen. They seem much too detailed and natural to be hand-drawn, but they don't look fractal or generated - there's a great variation between smooth, sweeping coast and squiggly rocky areas, and the island chains look like they're straight off a map. The whole thing looks incredibly earthlike and geographically realistic.
This is something I've been struggling with for a while - I've experimented with sampling google maps data, cutting and pasting to make a coastline, but it's incredibly laborious and I worry a local might recognize their beach somewhere! Did you use any real-world geographic data, was Wilbur involved in the coast as well, or did you draw them by hand? I'd understand if you don't want to give away a secret, but I'd love some pointers if possible - thanks!
Beautiful in every step. Everything done with such great care, I'm a fan. I hope you will do a PS tutorial at some point
P.S. History of your land is equally thrilling.
Last edited by ukie; 09-25-2013 at 12:05 AM.
Really nice maps! I quite like the look you've achieved in Wilbur, very nice coloring. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your creations!
Wow, I can't tell you how relieved I am to have found this thread so soon after joining the forum. I recently discovered Wilbur and all the examples I've seen, as impressive as they are, don't have anywhere near as realistically scaled and shaped mountain ranges as what you presented here. You have demonstrated the software so well, that at least I know, if I use it right, I can get the results I want! I especially love the wispy looking ranges, you really get the same fluid look real mountains have from satellite.
Nice working going here. Maybe i am late, but can i call to stop the bus for a second? I have a question about Wilbur.Originally Posted by Gumboot
How did you get all those wonderful shapes using Wilbur? To get the mountains and the "defined" rivers. Atm i am trying use like 10 levels of topography and blurring to get smooth levels but far to get too defined details like you did.
Any progress on this Gumboot? I was really liking where this was going.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
I have to confess there's really no secret at all - the coastlines are entirely hand drawn. They've probably gone through more revisions over the years than any other aspect of the geography, precisely because of the things you've mentioned above. My original coastlines were of your generic "squiggly line" variety but over the years, thanks to a love of geography and close study of real-world landscapes, I suppose I just have a better eye for what looks "realistic" now than before.
Particular areas of the coastline are "inspired" by real world geography, for example the southern coastline of the larger inland sea on the regional map is inspired by the coastline of Northern Europe.
The underlying shape comes from the heightmap, which is hand drawn, and then I ran erosion passes in Wilbur at different levels of detail to build the detailed shape of ridges and rivers. There was a lot of messing about and trial and error with it, particularly as I had some river paths I needed the water to follow so I had to "massage" my heightmap to get the water to flow the way I wanted, as on flat land things tend to get a bit unpredictable!
I couldn't tell you precisely what steps I did, as it really was a case of painstaking, agonizingly slow trial and error. I more or less followed existing tutorials on Wilbur - beginning with gentle erosion on a large scale to carve out river valleys then adding finer erosion over it. I just went finer than most people do, as I wanted to capture the tiny ridges and hill landscape of a real mountain range.
I thought people might like an update. I'm afraid I don't have anything much to report, as life has been getting in the way for a while.
Thanks for getting back - again, very impressive. For the past 6 months or so I've been studying paleogeographic maps for inspiration, hopefully at some point I'll have integrated the geography of coastlines enough to do the same. I'll keep checking back on this thread every few months!
Posting Permissions
