Oct / Nov '17 Lite Challenge: Vanatun

[Kier]

Love the 3D attached.

I haven't even used Wilbur yet. Heard of it, but haven't used it yet. So many cool apps out there. I really need to catch up with it all.

I do my mapping watching TV as well, lol. That's what laptops are for, laps.

Thanks guys,

I nabbed a frame because I never know what to do to make one up myself. I am going to rapidly run out of storylines to enable me to nab one already done. Then ill be stuck.

I made my usual height map based on contours so it would be easy from that point to work out where the rivers would be (see the 3D pic) but I used an app which is similar to Wilbur where it works out the rivers for you from the heightmap information. So mine erodes down the height map and then you can ask it to shade the terrain and do all of the texturing using a texture compositor app. If you want to know the full process then I can post a lot of the stages. Its possible to do them all using Wilbur and Gimp but personally I would find that trickier because I am not so familiar with how to use those apps properly. Normally I might use linux and Gimp etc but I have been sat watching telly and films whilst doing it and so using my windows laptop so its and old Paint Shop Pro and my windows version of the tool set.

[Redrobes]

Waldronate taking part in this challenge wrote Wilbur so he is the expert for that app. Its a free app and I have run it but never used it in anger tho I see loads of really nice river and drainage patterns being churned out by many people. I wrote mine but its a nightmare to use and does not have a UI on it. Theres lots of terrain generating apps out there too. Mouse has Vue which has made some nice output. I think the best of them are World Machine and others like that but they cost a lot.

I had to do a bit of a cookie cutter on my island so thats why it has a bit of a raised up cliff around the base. But it forces the island shape to be the same as the challenge target. If I was less restricted then I could have generated more random terrain and then it would have had better slope into the sea but the shape of the island would have been different. So my terrain this time is a bit blobby and thats down to my contours and limited ability to put loads of nice contours in. I do the contours by hand with a pen and then take a digi photo of it. So its down the the size of my printer (A4), thickness of the pen and res of the camera to get it back in and still make out nice contour lines.

I dont know of any app whatsoever that can generate great 3D terrain shapes that also can be made to target the final coastline to a predetermined shape. I also dont know of one where I could draw in the rivers and it would find the heights to make those rivers sensible to the terrain. That would be a heck of a program to have. Right now, if your going 3D, then you must generate the height first and then determine the rivers from it.

[Mouse]

Maybe that idea of drawing the rivers and creating the terrain around them is one you could make one of your splendid apps for?

If it never got any other use, it would at least teach us to draw semi-realistic rivers!

[Redrobes]

The chap I did MeDem with and I thought about it a lot. We made up Middle Earth in 3D but we had to start from the map which contains Anduin, Bruien and all the other rivers and mountains already in place. Eventually he did the terrain sculpting by hand and I wrote the tools to fill in the gaps - which the above island was used a couple of them namely the terrain generator and the texturer.

It may be possible to write such an app but it would be hard. You would have to solve many constraints all at once such that the rivers are all lower than the land around them and that all the usual flow params like it going downhill in the gradient of steepest decent apply. It may be (nay probably...) that you draw out impossible river systems and that it wont be able to solve it.

What we eventually decided tho was that it would be better and more useful if you could raise and lower the terrain and that it would very quickly calculate the rivers from it and then display it. So then you could manually sculpt the terrain and see the effects happening instantly as you do it. There was a game like that called "From Dust" but its fluid flow was very coarse. If you could get it so that it generated the rivers in a few seconds then it would he been useful enough so that you could manually shape the terrain to form into something that resembled the river pattern you needed.

With enough compute power it could be done. Its probably best to run it on the graphics card and get it to churn out the terrain since thats the sort of job they excel at. The Outerra engine for example can do this terrain modification in real time and show the results but it does not calculate the water flow for it.

Basically its a lot of work - hard work too, and all for a handful of enthusiasts like us !

[ScottDA]

I really like the 3D vesrion -- it really brings it all to life.

[ThomasR]

I love how you integrated the real life frame ! And the rendering is great !

[Redrobes]

I really like the 3D vesrion -- it really brings it all to life.

If your on windows or linux + wine and your interested then I could post the height map and a suitable colour map and the 3D program has already been posted in another thread so you can spin around it in real time. Let me know if thats interesting to you.

I love how you integrated the real life frame ! And the rendering is great !

Thanks Thomas. I dont know if that little brass plate works on the frame but it was a bit of fun and a way to sign it. I did steal the frame image from a public domain painting. A very easy / low effort way to get a border.

[ladiestorm]

I love both images... I especially love that frame!!! I like the colors on this one, and the fact that it's very simply done... it's clean, like it's uninhabited... that looks so cool to me!

[Redrobes]

Thanks Storm,

The frame is getting a lot of love. You can tell thats the bit I nicked and didnt do myself !!!

I think deep down I like to imagine these tropical islands that are unihabited or barely so. Not so sure there are many places like that left now. I should break out of my comfort zone and do something super populated and gritty. A place id not like to be in. Maybe try that thinking for the next challenge, but I am sure id struggle with it.