The Western Kingdoms - by Greason Wolfe

[waldronate]

Something very similar to this mountains-to-brushes process was going to be Fun With Wilbur Volume 7. It looks like my year (or more) worth of piddling around in getting actions implemented let you beat me to it. My goal was to be able to mass-produce the suckers using any of the shader settings under control of an automation system, but I ran afoul of nasty infrastructure things and it's sort of stalled.

It's possible to get a similar effect directly in Wilbur even today (except for the antialiasing on the 3D, of course). The critical part is the lighting (Texture>>Shader Setup for the Wilbur shader). Under Altitude, make the land color list and sea color list each contain just one color: white. Then set the elevation angle in intensity to 70 degrees and the ambient . The result should look as shown below.

Untitled-2.png

The base terrain is just a raw Filter>>Calculate Height Field with the Math Function "1000*sqr((ridged(x+0.4,y+0.3,1)*exp(-r*r*4)-0.15))", sphere center -2,-2,-2 and radii 4,4,4. Just tweak that +0.4 and +0.3 to move the mountains around and you have lots of quick-generated items. Things look better with erosion, of course...

[Lingon]

I like the third version most, the bold contrast makes it the most striking

[Greason Wolfe]

The cool thing about having Waldronate around here is that he always pops up with these entirely cool math functions for Wilbur. Sadly, I tried the function, and it resulted in Wilbur crashing. It's all good though, cause it gives me something to think about.

GW

[waldronate]

Weird. It works in V1.80 x64.
Untitled-3.png

Or, as we like to say at work:
untitled.png
(this medal gets a LOT of use).

[Azélor]

The reason why I don't use Wilbur is that it crashes very often on my computer too. 32 bits...

[Greason Wolfe]

Well, that might be the problem here. Still running version 1.75 on a 32 bit system. Like I said, though, it's all good. It still gives me some ideas to work with in the future. For now, I'll just continue along the course that I've set for myself and try to finish rendering these mountains over the next couple of days so that I can start putting them to use.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Whew! The first batch of 25 mountains is finally done. I'm not sure just how many more I will make. There is a part of me that says 25 is probably enough, but there is another part of me that says I should crank out about 100 of them in an effort to minimize the possibility of repeating patterns when I start adding them into the map. Anyone have thoughts on this, or suggestions?

GW

P.S. On the off chance that anyone might want to make use of these, please feel free to do so. They are all in scale to one another in terms of overall size. I wasn't super worried about showing specific elevation levels, just relative heights when they were compared to one another.

[Diamond]

There is a part of me that says 25 is probably enough, but there is another part of me that says I should crank out about 100 of them in an effort to minimize the possibility of repeating patterns when I start adding them into the map. Anyone have thoughts on this, or suggestions?

Join the Dark Side of Schwarzkreuz Mountain Making. Why settle for 100 when you can make 10,000?

They do look pretty fantastic though. And very generous to let us play with them; I may have to do some experimenting...

[Greason Wolfe]

Join the Dark Side of Schwarzkreuz Mountain Making. Why settle for 100 when you can make 10,000?

They do look pretty fantastic though. And very generous to let us play with them; I may have to do some experimenting...

There's a dark side of mountain making? And here I thought I was finally climbing my way out of that pit!

As for sharing . . . I've gotten so much from so many members here, it only seemed right to give something back. Besides, I'll probably make several dozen more of these, and keep them for myself.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Okay, so now that I'm armed (with over 4 dozen mountains), and dangerous (only to myself), it's time to put the mountain results to the test and see just how well they work as an actual part of the map. I tried a few different things in terms of blend modes and sharpening to see if I could get a look that I really liked. The results, shown below, are up for judgement. I know which way I'm leaning, but would like to hear what others have to say.

GW