The Porcine Coast -- Brand New Process
Hello Guild,
Again, I'm not looking for any accolades here; I just want to share my latest progress in generating realistic terrain without using a satellite DEM. I'm continuing to experiment with Photoshop and Inkscape (thank you to those of you who have suggested this amazing program!), devoting about 20 to 30 hours per week to this hobby, but I need your help to decide whether this particular map represents an improvement over my previous submissions. The name "Porcine" of course refers to the land mass' resemblance to a pig's head.
I've decided to go all the way and label some of the features, although I'm not entirely satisfied with the fonts.
After finalizing the map, I unfortunately realized the problem with my river widths; they seem a bit wide.
Please help me improve this map.
Thank you.
Peter
The Porcine Coast.png
It's a lovely map. I like the way you presented the mountains. On the pic attached you'll see two comments. The hills are suggested to justify the downward coure of the rivers that would flow into a lake as indicated. This to explain why the rivers don't flow and pool in the grasslands to the right. What are your thoughts? Screenshot_20200923-105325_Photo Editor.jpg
I really like the mountains but the flat land area seems way too flat, there should be at least some features in there right?
The perceived flatness might be an issue with the color gradient. I typically use an exponential-ish gradient for this very reason, since low-lying areas have very small mins and maxes to their elevatin.
Thank you KaiAeon, QED42 and morne for responding,
Yes, KaiAeon, your suggestion for adding hills to block the river and prevent pooling into a lake is very incisive. Yes, my fault for not filling in the "flat areas" with some topography. As a result, when I generated the rivers using Wilbur, the program gave me several unnatural looking rivers branching together; so I simply erased all but one branch, erroneously.
Actually, morne, I had no gradient whatsoever for the flat areas. I simply generated a mountain range and copied it, altering the copy and lowering the elevations considerably. I then pasted the two together, leaving nothing but flat space between the ranges.
Again, very incisive comments. In my next update on my "process," I've tried to improve the mountains as well as the spaces between them.
By the way, morne, your maps are fantastic and very inspirational. I frequently imagine myself frolicking in the worlds you've created, to pass the time during my menial job!
Keep creating those maps.
Peter
Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.Originally Posted by Peter Toth
Seriously, though, I really admire your tenacity in sticking with procedurally generated terrains. I tried for a long, long time to do that, using so many different programs (Wilbur, World Machine, Gaea, Genbrush, Houdini, probably more that I can't think of at the moment) and could just never get satisfying enough results. Eventually I had to "cop out" and cheat, haha.
Interesting approach to the lowlands. My suggestion would be to try and utilize masking and Wilbur's exponential function to create convincing lowlands. One thing I've realized by studying real-world terrain a bunch is that there is actually tons and tons of variation in elevation even in relatively flat areas that leads to winding rivers and the like, it's just usually really hard to see with a linear elevation gradient. That's why you see a lot of color gradients that have more color variation at lower elevations.
The mountains on this map remind me strongly of the southwest coast of Norway because the flat-bottomed valleys looks very much like glacial valleys. However, a map of Norway showing roughly the same sized features covers much less terrain than what you have here (roughly a third to half as much, meaning that I would expect the scale bar to read at most about 300 to 500 kilometers).
You're being bitter by the Wilbur bug/feature that tends to run approximately parallel rivers across overly flat terrain. In the real world, rivers tend to push together due to erosion factors. Wilbur's erosion features (especially Incise Flow) tend to keep the first-found features on the random surface, many of which which would tend to disappear in the real world as rivers merge and move over the floodplain. A quick workaround for some of the problems is to reduce the resolution of your terrain, blur it a bit, and then run rivers. The rivers will be in pretty much the right places in the more detailed map, but will tend to have fewer artifacts (or at least different artifacts).
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