WIP - Forgotten Lands

[pasis]

Nicely done. The base textures give it that warm feeling of old limestone.

Two minor niggles: there are a fair number of overly straight parallel stream channels (nothing you can do about that; they are a common artifact of CG fluvial models) and the streams that descend to the river on the right wiggle rather more than I would expect. Water follows the path of steepest descent and the meanders in the stream are a bit out of place. It's what I would expect for a footpath (people don't always follow the path of steepest descent willingly) or a large river on an almost flat plain (where the river has to dissipate flow energy by going side-to-side and making meanders).

Actually I think I can correct the GC artifacts because in photoshop it's just grey scale image and I can even out the paraller streams. I'll give it a try at least. Yeah the rivers...I always tend to have too wiggly river path and I'll take a look at them too.

Attached is the waterfall I just added. I will tweak it, but I think I will keep it

[AslanC]

Not a bad waterfall. Something looks off though... can you mist it up?

[Steel General]

I agree, unless it is falling into a deep pool with no rocks, the mist should be heavier.

But overall a really nice attempt.

[Greason Wolfe]

Actually I think I can correct the GC artifacts because in photoshop it's just grey scale image and I can even out the paraller streams. I'll give it a try at least. Yeah the rivers...I always tend to have too wiggly river path and I'll take a look at them too.

Attached is the waterfall I just added. I will tweak it, but I think I will keep it

Hrm . . . I seem to remember seeing a really great tutorial on doing waterfalls in Photoshop. I'll have to see if I can find it again and forward it to you, if you are interested in seeing it. It was originally written for use as a post rendering edit for Terragen, but it might apply to what you're trying to accomplish.

GW

Edit : Found a copy on my system. The images appear to be broken (invalid jpg files) but the text is still in good shape. You'll have to weed out the parts that apply to your efforts, and I'm almost sure there is another tutorial somewhere that I'll have to find. Add the one I do have as a zip file just in cas you're interested.

[Jykke]

Have you tried how the mountains fit to a larger overland map ? I usually stumble a bit when it comes to doing that. :S

[pasis]

Thanks GW for the waterfall intructions. I took a look at it and saw few good tips.

Jykke, yes I have considered making a larger map. I decided to try this smaller piece first and learn from it. With the bigger map comes lot more work and this smaller is a time consumer already.

[Jykke]

Ok, maybe we will see a larger version in the near future then =) I'd expect to see couple of more mountains on the same map and some lower land between them (like your previous maps for example). Keep up the good work!

Btw, the issues with artifacts in the terrain might be resolved by adding deep thin flows in geocontrol as the final filter (you might have to play around with the settings..). I also recommend increasing the terrain resolution in geocontrol, to 4096. It will affect the terrain generation time quite much, but the results are also wayyyy better. And you can always decrease the resolution afterwards in photoshop if it's too big for the document you are working on.

[pasis]

The full map I have contains also one smaller mountain and the already visible mountains continue a bit futher. The full resolution I have is 2048x2048 (I didn't run the 4096 as it took ages and I had enough details for this project with 204.
When I'm finished I hope I have learned enough to start a new and bigger project. I have concerns about the geo control, because I'm a newbie in it and there is so much I don't understand. I'm not sure if I'm getting old or something, but self learning GC feels so hard (or it just is so darn complex).

[Jykke]

GeoControl can surely produce beautiful details, but It should support multiple cores and have the possibility to use 64bit memory space. And I must admit that it isn't easy to produce the end result you have in mind at the first place. I probably have spent over a week (in hours) with the program.. and even then just scratched the surface.

[Greason Wolfe]

Thanks GW for the waterfall intructions. I took a look at it and saw few good tips.

Jykke, yes I have considered making a larger map. I decided to try this smaller piece first and learn from it. With the bigger map comes lot more work and this smaller is a time consumer already.

I'm almost certain that I have another tutorial along the same lines that I used once, well before I joined the guild. Personally, I thought it was a bit better, so if I find it, I'll pass it along. Glad to hear that first one was helpful.

BTW, I'm really loving this work your doing, a definite thumbs up from me.

GW