Tainted Land

[Will Phillips]

Love the renders, Jykke! So, I took a look at the geocontrol and am downloading the demo now. What does vue do?

Mind giving us a super quick overview of your work process?

[Jykke]

Love the renders, Jykke! So, I took a look at the geocontrol and am downloading the demo now. What does vue do?

Mind giving us a super quick overview of your work process?

Basically I'm using geocontrol to create the terrain, and vue to render & texture it. Here's a tutorial on the terrain generation here but you should find more (and better? ) tutorials with google.

There's also a tutorial on virtual lands that will give you a good understanding of how vue and geocontrol can be used together.

On this map I basically did some crossed strokes with the isoline tool of geocontrol (just like shoelaces), applied few erosion filters and combined the heightmap with the base terrain.

You can ask if there's problems with the software, or you can't get it to work as you want. Btw, you can render those terrains with other programs aswell, vue isn't the only one that is suitable for it.

Edit: there's a free version of vue out there (on their homepage), that can produce the type of renders seen here.

[Jykke]

Maybe it's an island afterall..

[su_liam]

Looks like a nice place to raise goats.

[Redrobes]

I liked the mountains you rendered alone a lot. I thought they had great erosion and form. Better than my GTS can produce. WorldMachine is good for erosion too.

The continent looks more like an island to me too. I think its the scale of the promontory ridges into the sea plus the sea texture has a long fade and what looks like sea foam for a distance. All gives the illusion of larger scale. I reckon that the veg texture you are using is too sharp and rough and some of the island pics looks like a lot of noise on top of them. I don't use Vue so I don't have any suggestions.

What I can suggest is to make the map very high res like you have done but instead of blurring it a lot try using a pixelate filter. Thats the one where it straight up averages blocks of pixels together like a 3x3, 4x4, or a 9x9 etc. For an 800x600 final, render 3200x2400, use a 4x4 pixelate to average them and then use pixel resample, or point resample or nearest neighbor to drop it to exactly 25% of big size. Its sounds like a duff idea but try it and you will see its great. There's fairly solid math behind it. Result will be the terrain not blurry but the trees will be more even.

[Jykke]

Thanks for the good tips and feedback Redrobes!

I tried to add a small noise function to the terrain heightfield to generate more details on closeups. Unfortunately it didn't work as well as I wanted, and for example, those sharp textures are one result of the experiment. I'll try the technique with the pixelate filter, but in the end, I might need to come up with better textures to fix it. The newest renders have a fractal color map and a small noise bump map on the forest texture. It has also some issues, as it looks more like a grassfield, not a forest. The closeups might be a problem also.

The mountains you mentioned have a small trick behind them. I have actually formed them with a tool that lets me control the shape quite well (in geocontrol). Basically they are done with combination of strokes like this (and then I just added some minor erosion effects to the shape):