[WIP] Theia Project: The Duchy of Vistenia (using Wilbur and Grand Designer)

[nwisth]

And that's another pass of Precipitation Erosion! This one took about nine hours to complete.

I think this is the last time I ask Wilbur to do ten single-core erosion passes in a row...

-Niels

[nwisth]

Yet another update: Yesterday, at 1600 hours, the precipitation erosion came to an end. After working at 100% for 55 hours straight, good old Core 17 managed to finish up, allowing me to reboot.

I went back into BIOS, turning NUMA back on - and discovered I had two installations of Wilbur, with the old 1.71 version stuck to my start menu. Obviously, I'd been running that one while doing my 55-hour erosion pass. *facepalm* I started the latest 2018 version instead, and lo and behold - this time, precipitation erosion started using all the cores, and finished three passes in about 30 minutes. Impressive!

So - if anyone plans on Wilburing a huge map in the near future, Learn From My Fail and use the latest version.

Now it looks like I'll manage to get somewhere with this close-up map. I'm already itching to get it into Grand Designer, but first, I need to Incise Flow a few more times - any maybe do a few more erosion passes, now that they fly by so quickly!

-Niels

[nwisth]

Well, it's been a week. I've gotten quite far on the region map of Parvenia, but I figured I ought to actually finish the Vistenia map.

I've added an elevation map, a scale ruler, as well as a political map, where I had a bit of fun making the heraldry for the various baronies. Since Vistenia is covered with a thick eucalypt forest, I made sure that all the colors used on the shields are genuine eucalyptus dyes, as detailed by Sally Blake in her Eucalyptus Dye Database. Check her site out, it's an impressive piece of work! :)

I decided to skip the latitude and longtitude grid and scale hexes (they're there for when I need it), and make a finished version that'll look good on the wall. I could use a bigger printer - on a 60 cm wide roll the 10 px map symbols are a little hard to read.


Here's the finished map, reduced to 75% size and 32% quality to come under the size limit:

Vistenia-satmap-8bit-compressed-and-shrunk.jpg


If you want to see the full-size version, you can download the full size 76 MB one from Dropbox.

I guess I ought to post it in the finished map list too, but I will keep working on the Parvenia map here in this thread, since it's a sub-map of sorts.

Of course, I am posting things here so I can learn, so please, if you have any feedback to give me, it's very, very welcome. :)

-Niels

[nwisth]

Alright - onto the magic of zooming in, Wilbur style!

As stated above, I wanted to get closer to the action of my novel-in-progress, and cut out a 2 by 1 piece of the Vistenia height map, which I increased 2000%.

Here's a mini-map of Parvenia & Neighbors, with the enlarged area shown:

ParveniaAndNeighbors.jpg

It was a lot of hard work creating more detail. I ran it through Wilbur and Photoshop 27 times before I had a finished height map with all the rivers, streams and eroded hills in place. After that, I could run it through Grand Designer, to try and get a nice texture. Here's a work-in-progress snip of the model, looking up from the south:

UpperParvenia-GrandDesignerSnip-4.JPG

I forgot that I was at the limit of what Grand Designer could render out - I had to put the Ambient Occlusion and sediment/vegetation maps through PhotoZoom to make them match the resolution of my height map. :o

Adding light maps and river maps from Wilbur, I started hammering everything together in Photoshop - trying to make textures that show the different types of vegetation, as well as indicate the rising terrain.

I also wanted to have rivers of the right size. Working my way down from my world map, I found that at this scale, each pixel was 2,96 meters - which would allow me to draw in individual buildings, if I was so inclined. I think I will zoom in further to create Thunder Falls Castle, and maybe the town of Parvan, but other than that, I'd rather just use simple map symbols for now. Anyway, with almost 3 meters per pixel, I could expand the selection of my river system accordingly, and make the Timsbury river at least a hundred meters wide at Thunder Falls.

Here's the map in it's current form - shrunk and compressed to fit.

Upper-Parvenia-1-shrunk-and-compressed.jpg

The uncompressed jpg is almost half a gig in size, but I've made a slightly compressed version at half size (46 MB) which you can DL from dropbox. :)

As always, I'm very keen on hearing some feedback. I'm very excited about this new-found ability to zoom in on my world map, but I feel like I'm just scratching the surface when it comes to height-map generation and crafting realistic landscapes on an increasingly detailed scale. Am I onto something, or am I doing it wrong? Are there other pieces of software or techniques I should be using? I'm really keen on learning here at the feet of the masters. :D

-Niels

[Naima]

Nice work ... I thought Grand Designer could only render planetary spherical maps?

[nwisth]

Thanks, Naima!

Grand Designer is made to quickly make planet maps, but you can upload any greyscale heightmap into it, and start tweaking. Mind you, it changes whatever you load to a 2:1 aspect ratio, so it's best if your height map is 2:1 as well, from the get go.

To avoid seeing everything as a globe, use the "Coverage percentage" and "Flatenning" sliders, found under the "Global" tab. That will unfurl it into a nice 2:1 rectangle.

-Niels

[Naima]

Thanks, Naima!

Grand Designer is made to quickly make planet maps, but you can upload any greyscale heightmap into it, and start tweaking. Mind you, it changes whatever you load to a 2:1 aspect ratio, so it's best if your height map is 2:1 as well, from the get go.

To avoid seeing everything as a globe, use the "Coverage percentage" and "Flatenning" sliders, found under the "Global" tab. That will unfurl it into a nice 2:1 rectangle.

-Niels

Nice , I did use it some time ago but I missed the flattening feature , perhaps is a new update...

thersis_closeup_by_n_a_i_m_a-da67vhf.jpg

[nwisth]

It was this very picture of yours that made me look into Grand Designer in the first place!

The program has a lot of good stuff going for it, but there's one major feature I miss - adding a custom texture map. I was hoping to use it to render Theia's world map, but without a texture import function, all I could do was make a pallid recreation. While it tries to simulate climate, it is very basic compared to the Köppen techniques found here at the Guild. For my purposes, I found it worked a lot better on smaller scale maps, where the sediment and vegetation tools came in handy (even though the ring shadow simulation was excellent!).

-Niels

[nwisth]

The work trudges on! I've added a couple of gold mines to the map of Upper Parvenia, given it a hex grid with 1 km hexes to make it easier to calculate travel times, added longitude and latitude lines to anchor it more precisely to the world, and added a mini elevation map.

Check it out here! :)

Upper-Parvenia-2-shrunk-and-compressed.jpg

(or download a bigger one from dropbox, at 61,8 MB)

Not sure what more to add - if you have any ideas, don't hesitate to mention it! Otherwise it goes in the finished maps section soon. :)

I've also zoomed in yet again, to a scale where each pixel is 25 centimeters, wilburing the terrain once more (so much quickly now that the map is a bit smaller), and finally starting construction work on Thunder Falls Castle. The map is far from done, but this time I've used Grand Designer for a lot more than it's supposed to. I've drawn my castle design straight into the greyscale height map, trying to calculate very carefully the scale of each increment of tone. Unfortunately, the Photoshop color picker is very imprecise; even at 16 bits, it only gives me 256 levels of grey to chose from - but at least the gradient tool gets around that problem. I've had a lot of fun with Add and Subtract layers, and been tearing my hair a bit as well.

Here's a couple of Grand Designer previews showing Thunder Falls Castle from the air and the ground. These are only simple WIPs, without vegetation, crenelations, windows or other details, but it's fun to see how the castle design works in 3D without having to start learning Blender or some other 3D program.

A bird's eye view:
TFC-3D-lowres-v1.jpg

An attempt at ground level view:
ThunderFallsFromGround.jpg

The waterfall is about 80 meters wide and 65 meters high, to give you a measure of scale. :)

-Niels

[Jean-Abdel]

What you're doing is really impressive! Are the trees on the ground level picture added on Photoshop or gran designer can add them directly ?