Mar / Apr 2018 Lite Challenge: Sosnasib

[Greason Wolfe]

So as I mentioned over in Nopkin's thread a few days ago, I've been struggling with a "blah" mood over the last week. It is starting to fade. One of the things coming out of that mood is a sense of dissatisfaction with where this map was going, or, to be more precise, an unhappiness with the way it wasnt quite coming together. As a result of that, I rebooted it this morning with an entirely different approach. Still have a lot of work to do (finishing up river/lake placement and height field editing as well as forest placememt) and it is a somewhat slow process given that I do some work, run a "quick" render in terragen and then repeat the process again and again until things are where I want them, but I am making steady progress. Here is the latest rough version of what I have accomplished so far. It looks a little odd in some places because I haven't done any height field edition yet, but that will com soon...I hope.

### Latest WIP ###
2018 MALC WIP 101.jpg

[Mouse]

Wow!

I didn't know Terragen could do that kind of thing.

Very impressive

[Straf]

I echo Mouse's first word. Wow! That's very impressive looking stuff there.

[Greason Wolfe]

The latest version of terregen is crazy powerful. As I understand it they created the new Universal sequence (stars circling the mountain) piece that we see at the beginning of movies. Can't afford to license that version but I still have a good license for my pre 1.0 version.

And thanks to both mouse and straf for the kind words. So long as my mood doesn't start slipping backwards, I still have a fair chance of getting this done.

[Neyasha]

Oh wow, that's really different. I like it very much, especially the coastline. The fjords and skerries in the north look amazing!

[QED42]

What the what

I feel like you skipped about 100 generations of human technological advancement between the last two WIP images.

[aeshnidae]

Are you sure you didn't just pop over to a place with fjords and take an aerial photo? Because WHOA that's really something! I've never done anything with height maps. I'm going to search the Guild for a tutorial.

[Greason Wolfe]

@QED - no, only skipped 98 generations.

@ aeshnidae - actually what I did was take the dem data for the mid western portion of the north american coast, and flood it with another 900 feet of water. It basically wipes out where I grew up and where I now live, and turns a chunk of the cascade mountain range into those fjords and skerries. I suppose you could say I did take a picture though.

[Greason Wolfe]

An update before I take a break from this before my eyes get too twitchy. Added in more rivers/lakes and then started working the northern coast. Also tweaked the render settings to give a better view of that northern coast as well as the existing rivers/lakes. I am of a mind to create a canal in the northern portion of the map as well just to break things up a bit. Figure I have two, maybe three more hours of river/lake editing before I am ready to mess around with the mountains. Not gonna do much to the mountains, mostly a bit of smoothing and blending so that they aren't quite so "saw-toothed."

### Latest WIP ###
2018 MALC WIP 102.jpg

[Greason Wolfe]

So, after a bit of sleep and some thought experiments, I got up this morning and decided to test my height field editing process. In general, I was pleased with the results. Took a bit of time, as well to tweak the render settings and try to find a good balance between showing the northern portion of the map along with the rivers/lakes without sacrificing too much of the mountain perspective. Again, generally pleased with the results. So now it will be back to cutting in/editing rivers/lakes, adding in forested areas and, maybe tweaking the textures (not entirely happy with the snow) and coloring before a top end render and labeling.

### Latest WIP ###
2018 MALC WIP 103.jpg