April 2018 Challenge: The Dominion of Tirothell (name subject to change)

[Falconius]

Here's the generation:
Generated.jpg

I'm not sure how much in this challenge I am, it's more of an experiment, but the challenge is the impetus and inspiration for this experiment so I decided to take a shot anyways. The experiment is this: I'm trying out zbrush again because it has a ton of really nifty tools to experiment with, and I saw this project as an opportunity to sort of relearn how to use it, and for trying out a lot of the new stuff they added. Troedel has made a regional map in 3D and ever since I saw that I wanted to take a page out of his book and try it out myself. So that is my goal here.

Anyways here are the first "place" icons I've made, a tower on the right and a temple sort of thing on the left. I'm going to chalk up all the things like this under the "castles" figure. Obviously I'm not going to make a unique icon for all 44 castles/places, just the interesting ones.
Icons1.png
For non castle icons, I've only got 2 cities and 18 towns so they shouldn't prove too much of a difficulty.

I'm trying to develop kind of a unified style or theme for the icons but I don't know how successful that will be in the end.

[Falconius]

Just thinking about the description, I have 18% arable land, for which the figure 20 thousand square miles is given, if you take that figure and then multiply it by the 20 people per square mile you end up with a total population of only 400 thousand. This figure fits in a lot better of what a desolate land that is mostly wilderness would look like, even in todays world. If you take the population figure it suggests of 2.2 million people, which, for some reason, is calculated on the total size of the country, and one puts it into the arable land you get a figure of 110 people per square mile, which is higher than the abundant medieval France which the figures are derived from. The way I figure it the population figure on this random generator really should have one calculated for the arable land, and another perhaps at a tenth of the strength calculated for wilderness.

The reason I'm thinking about this instead of working on the map is, because working on the map is hard. Been trying to figure out how to approach the depiction of the land the topography and such. At this scale making a map 300 x 300 miles wide there really is nothing to model as such if you are going for realism. Better off just using a flat plane with a very slight bump map for realism. So the other option is to do a stylized sort of iso map where the features are way out of proportion to reality (which is why I never understand why people worry so much about the scale of trees to mountains, like it makes a difference at that point, they are both way out of scale in any case). The problem I'm having with this stylized topographic thing is, as I said, just that it's hard and I figured I'd come and whine about here before cracking on.

[Falconius]

So I was looking at this huge desert in satellite maps to get reference for sand dunes and I found this little village in the middle of nowhere. It looks abandoned but there are some more scattered buildings like this at the edges to the dunes on these bizarre areas that must have an aquifer or something. Anyhow I thought it was exciting and I just had to share it and this seemed like an appropriate place since this was what the references are for.

https://binged.it/2v8zAoB

There are lines the map designates as roads.... but they aren't.
Found another interesting thing:
https://binged.it/2v8C6eC

[kacey]

This will be interesting to follow, the buildings look good so far. I haven’t managed to make any buildings in zbrush yet though I’ve tried so hopefully you’ll give some pointers along the way. I’ve found doing organic sculpting in zbrush really fluid and easy to catch on to but any hard surface projects that I’ve tried so far have failed. I’m excited to see how you go about doing this. I know the new version of zbrush 2018 has some nifty new deformers for getting interesting hard surface shapes but I haven’t tried them out yet, been too busy playing around with the new sculptris pro mode which is really making things easier so far. I’ll be curious to see how you do the terrain, or will you be using other 3D software along with zbrush?

Oh and try checking out the South Pole too, I spent a few hours the other day zoomed in on it and was surprised to see all the little settlements scattered around down there and roads to nowhere in the snow, some of them go for a long time with only a few little buildings at the end. I even managed to find what looked like a sinking ship stuck in the ice. Seems people will find a way to live in any environment no matter how remote.

[Falconius]

I find I'm not really getting into Zbrush like I did when I tried the trial out a year or so ago. There are some fantastic features that I really love, like Zmodeler, and live booleans, but the other stuff just seems not as fluid as 3DCoat. I may have been spoiled by 3D Coat to be honest, especially in regards to deformation (3d coat has a tool called "Pose" and it insanely powerful and easy to use), I can now see why people have difficulty dropping one tool for another in the opposite direction. The thing is that I've only got another 14 days or so to return Zbrush and I'm trying to figure out if I should bite the price tag or not, so I may drop parts of this project and do a direct sculpting comparison for a figure or face. As well as trying out Moment of Inspiration for the modeling aspect which would cover the advantage of Zmodeler. In short I may be too busy making a bunch of desperate stuff and not accomplishing much here.