[Region 1][Map 07][Location 02] Snapgallows

[The Cartographist]

SeerBlue - I haven't had the time to really read through all of your posts, but what you are doing is really inspiring. Involving the kids in this creative endeavor is fantastic. The benefits to you, to the children, and to the Guild itself are really fun to watch.

[Redrobes]

Oooohhh an ortho view of Snapgallows... now don't forget to let us all know where on the hills Snap sits ! I can then update the main map - not that its big enough to show up much but I like to keep it up to date.

[SeerBlue]

Now I will have to search thru several gigs of Snap renders to find out exactly where we put it, I guess that is one of the problems with growing old, forget where you put your keys, your wallet, and if your lucky, your Village.

Lemur, Bumblemouse and I have been fiddling around with the latest terragen free release, as I have been working for ages to get a realistic Anduin River and loads of streams and such into a terrain made by Monks, and with the new release Lemur and I have had a good bit of success, worked out some kinks in my process and am quite happy now.
Weelllll back to the Anduin Vale, then of to Hebbies for a bit of Pochard after that.
SeerBlue

[SeerBlue]

oops, forgot to upload this for Lemur, its her render of the CWBP world in Terragen, with clouds. She is so glad she can make clouds.
SeerBlue

[SeerBlue]

I know, I know, this has nothing to do with Snapgallows, at all, but I am quite happy, I have spent years, yup years, trying to get realistic water for Monks Anduin Vale terrain, right down to streams, and not just the look of water, but water with volume and transperancy, so if one was to do a render the rocks and peddles on the bottom of the stream would show BENEATH the surface.....Well I am finally getting close to where I want to be, and yup, this is a crappy render, and yup the colors are horrid ( I used them so I could find my 10 pixel wide water on a 4097 terrain), and yup, my water is thicker than the channel it flows in, but that is just because this is all by hand, GTS should take all the hand generation of water terrain out of the process...so any way this is two terrains in terragen2 (free), one is terrain and the other is just water, merged over it to give the water volume,,,,a real pain in the butt to draw a water terrain in any program...
Nothing great to look at but it took me ages to get here, and I don't think anyone else has given it a real go, so I am happy.
The elevation at the top of the render is about 600 meters, at the bottom about 325 meters, so this isn't a terragen lake plane, it is a water terrain for the water, which means some day I could do Waterfalls.....
SeerBlue

[Redrobes]

I pulled out Anduin Vale last week and had another play with it. I was toying with the idea of taking the full map and just running it through the first stage just to see what it would look like but then I found that I would have to do all the flow maps. All 3600 of them and then I quickly lost the will to live again. Gonna have to find a better way of doing that. Maybe I should just go for it without them and see how it comes out. I really want to see that full map textured.

Coincidentally I was also doing a stream with pebbles at the bottom yesterday as part of my tile texturing monthly challenge. As I said there, I am doing that for many reasons other than the challenge itself and this sort of thing was one of them. If you want the textures I used then I can send them over. Are you trying to do it completely procedurally instead ?

[Tancread]

The water looks great, but it does have an odd effect near the back where it looks to me like the water is sitting on top of a flat plain. I don't know the software but it might help to deepen the banks a bit. That said the water looks like water, which is really nice.

[SeerBlue]

Hey RR, right now it is all procedural, if I throw to many textures or imae maps in it slowwwwws down the render alot, on this laptop that little render, at like .3 quality, took an hour,,,a long time to wait to see if nudgin the water terrain a meter up or down fixed the water on top of the terrain oops.
I have been watching your tiles thread, looks really cool, the snow and stream are especially well done.
Hey Tancread, yup in some places it is on top of the terrain, becasue what I did was chunk the places water flows on the terrain out of the heightfield in Leveller and the used levellers brushes to add height here and there ,by eye, so in some spots I was heavy handed I guess, turns in the river are the hardest, it is a bugbear keeping the water level from bank to bank along the arc after the terrain generation app did its best to erode it realistically.

Well back at it before I forget where I was and what I was doing.
SeerBlue

[SeerBlue]

haa, I fixed the water on top of terrain problem, and then had the thought,,,well I have the snapgallows heightfield, why not do some terragen renders with some streams, so I added that to my list, but haven't done it yet, and it may be a bit before I do, as I have 2 job interviews today, and after 5 years of retirement, meaning just being a child minder,tour guide, cook, storyteller and so on, I may, hopefully have another thing to add to my plate.
Nothing really hard, or intellectually challenging, just stocking shelves at Wally Mart at night, so I can upgrade my system in a few weeks, and get the kiddies a laptop down the road..
So, if I do start work, there may be a drop in Snap posts for a bit until I work out my sleep, work, entertain the FHCO's schedule,,,oh and eat as well.
SeerBlue

[SeerBlue]

Here is the latest bit of Snapgallows detailing we have been working on, its a lift for the Quarries/Tunnels. Once we built it it was decided we needed some way to power it, so we went for a windmill, then the question was asked "what if the wind is not blowing", so we did some creative medieval thinking and decided we would use the wind mill to fill a large reservior with water, (the big one is out of view), the wind mill would fill it, and when the lift needed to run on days no wind was blowing the water would be used to push the large moving gate back and forth, turning gears, pulling cables, and raising and lowering the lift...overkill yes, did we learn oodles, yup, does it work with sketchy physics, for the most part, are cable leaves the wheels/gears at some points as Sketchup sees it as a rod and not a flexible cable.
SeerBlue, and most of the FHCO's