August/September 2017 Challenge: Revealing Dido

[Redrobes]

Andreas stood on the cliff top and gazed out over the Mediterrainian Sea late one afternoon. His classes had finished a little early and he still had some time to get down to the cove and see what the sea had washed up.

The cove was never visited as it had steep sides and no easy path down but he knew the route and each and every hand hold. The tide was out and there had been a bit of a storm the night before so it was with some anticipation that there might be something special today.

A thin stretch of sand lay between the giant bastions of the cliff face. Near the shore many rock pools formed from all of the rock that had fallen off of the cliff. Hardly a place that you might sunbathe but it was great for catching jetsam in the boulder crevises.

Some seaweed, a few more rotten ship beams and some indistinguishable rusty iron metal was all that he noticed. Then a large crab went into a rock pool and his eye caught the glint of something at the bottom of the pool.

Its gold - a coin. Reaching in he took it out. It was unlike any coin he had seen before. For a good ten minutes he studied the coin then his intrigue got the better of him and he started scouring the other pools. Sure enough, another coin showed up.

After more searching he had to be content with his two gold coins. Returning home he showed his father who thought they were very unusual. As it happened, his father knew of a friend who was a scuba diver with an interest in archaeology and took one of the coins over to him the next day.

It was only two more days before the archaeologist got a boat out to the cove and anchored it offshore. With his scuba gear he made a dive down to the bed and discovered that there were many more coins lying on the sea bed all clustered around a subsea plateau that once had slipped from the cliff. Brushing aside the loose sand some sculptured features began to appear. Definitely Roman this was once a villa. With limited air he returned but later on got out some of the reference books for the area.

With some study it appears that the cliff once had a large villa of a Roman merchant who was very wealthy and had some reknown. His villa had some anecdotal notes about its stature and some references to the parties that were once held there.

Some weeks later a proper archaeological excavation is underway and the Roman Villa is being uncovered. Now that the top layers of rock and sand have been removed the exceptional mosaic floor is being revealed to show a pictogram of the story of Aeneas and Dido...


Using: Submerged, Local Map and Gold.

[Falconius]

And so it begins..

Cool, looking forward to it.

[Mouse]

Wow Red!

I didn't know you were a story teller?

I'm also looking forward to this

[Redrobes]

Thanks ! I made a start on it late the other night just to see if it was even in the range of me doing it and I think it is so I started my thread. I had better explain the local element. As some of you may know I live in the uk at about the middle of the Cider Sea not too far north of Mouse and from where there is a big festival held each year with people like Ed Sheeran playing... you know the one...

Were surrounded by archaeology of numerous dates and eras from Neolithic onwards. Not a million miles from me there is a place called Low Ham and back in the 50's there was a Roman Villa discovered. When dug it revealed a large and frankly spectacular Romain mosaic floor showing panels with this story of Aeneas and Dido. It was dug up and transferred to the Museum of Somerset where it is on display and I took a photo of it. So it would make a good texture map...

So thats my local map connection. The submerged floor of this villa will use the actual roman mosaic. I was tempted by using the technique that was done by Pyrandon many years back. Its a super thread and definitely worth a look if you havent. Originally I thought maybe id try to use it and make a floor but the local map option made me think I need to use the local one.

I had better post an image of my photo which should form part of the floor. The title of my entry is a bit of a pun on the map image which you will see...

If you want to know more about the panels then its best to look it up online. Wikipedia has an entry for this floor but I think there are better descriptions about - ill see if I can edit in the link - yes this one from the museum itself is a good start.

[Redrobes]

The reason I wanted to do this map was to try out some submerged texturing so first up I need some 3D terrain of a steep but not sheer cliff face with a load of rocks at the bottom. The idea is that the cliff face has subsided and a plateau of rocks including a burried villa is sitting mostly underwater.

I used Gimp and russled up an approximate height map of a cliff with no features to it. Its just a new image of size 1024x1024 with a fade up and I did this with a combo of pen and airbrush and a lot of smoothing. Then I made up some noise maps. I did 3 in total of different scales. Again, thats just creating new greyscale images of different sizes, adding a lot of noise to it and then scaling them up to the same 1024 size.

I load the greyscale images into my app which holds them in floating point. I always save all my height maps in HF2 format. My app allows me to add or subtract different scaling amounts of heights together. So I add the base image, smooth it a lot more and make it about 100m high. Then add a bit of each of the noise maps at different amounts like 15m or 5m or 1m for the fine stuff.

Once they are all summed it looks like the image. The image was a screen grab from my 3D viewer app which is free to use and I have included it as a zip file. You can follow along with this app in 3D if you like - just do your own virus checking on it and use at your own risk etc etc. The app is for windows and will work just perfectly under Wine for Linux (Mac ? Dunno maybe). Anyway, the app is a single file and it just needs to be put into some directory and it takes in a Height file and a Color file. If there is no colour file then it will display it white like shown. The height can be a BMP, PNG or an HF2 type. I have included the height HF2 file as another zip so put that into the same dir before running it.

When you run the app it will be pretty flat and rough (and it will complain there is no color file...). So press H key a few times to raise the height up a lot and also press the '6' key which sets it to 1024 res. Then you spin about using I,J,K,M,O,P,W,A,S,Z,E,R keys. Its not tremendously intuitive but you soon get used to the keys.

I'll post images and HF2 zips to try with this app.

[Redrobes]

I made up a load more greyscale images and added the heights up. I also made up a guessed round rock with gimp and made up some more layers with different sized rock copies splattered about a bit. When a rock sits on another it sums up in height. When it partially overlaps another rock it doesnt quite look right but it was acceptable. With rocks nobody really knows what shape they should be. Its plausible !

So then I made up more layers to make the bulge in the cliff face where the majority of material would have slid down and then added & subtracted more layers to try to create a depression in it where the archaeologists have been removing material to reveal the house.

Finally, I drew some straight lines in two layers of stone work which is going to be the border of the villa. Not much of this villa will actually be shown - it looks like most of it is going to be under the rock.

That'll do for now - let me know if the 3D app works !

### Latest WIP ###

[Diamond]

Yay, RR in a challenge! Very cool idea, something I would've never thought to do. I love the range of stuff you all are coming up with.

[Redrobes]

Thanks Diamond !

So far its been more work than its worth but doing the 3D up front saves time later on. Its time to do some texturing and then ill probably go back and refine the 3D model and bounce between the 3D model and texturing of it.

Once I have a 3D model in height map format then as part of my build script I always export a gradient map and a light map. I can set the light vector and then the program can work out the shading value for it based on the 3D shape. The gradient is just a pure slope factor.

Lighting.png Gradient.png

I had my rocks layer that I made in 3D and converted it to a mask, mostly black and white, with a little grey on the transitions.

RocksMask1.png

I did the same with the two "brick" course models of the villa which is just like the rocks mask above but with the straight lines.

Now that I have a bunch of masks, gradient and lighting images I can use my texture program to put in certain textures based on the mask. Just like Gimp and Photoshop layers but I get a bit more control over them - the details are a bit complicated but in this case where they are white it pastes in texture where its black it doesn't.

So putting all that together then it comes up with this:
Color01.png

And when I add in the lighting such that where it is dark it adds black as a texture then it now looks like this

Color02.png

Not too bad but its still lacking the sea which I will do next time.

[Redrobes]

Where normally the sea would be a real hard job without the height map, when you have the 3D model the sea becomes quite easy to do.

The first thing I did was to set up a caustics texture map so that where it is underwater it throws down some caustics. The height map has been set so that it has negative heights below the sea level and positive heights above. So where it is negative I paste in a little of the caustics texture map.

Color03.png

I can then set up the amount of blue / green texture to paste in based on the depth of the water.

Color04.png

And then I can tell it to add foamy white texture where the depth of the water is very close to the surface which is the attachment below because I left it large. If we take that texture map and drape it back over the 3D model then it now shows what the scene looks like in 3D. If you save the texture map and open it up in Gimp or bitmap editor and save it out as Color.png in the same directory as the DragonFlight App with the Height.hf2 file then you can run the DragonFlight app and move around the scene in 3D.

The surface of the water needs some more work and I need to get in the mosaic but this is where I am up to at present.

### Latest WIP ###

[Mouse]

Oh I like the sea

Its kind of the same thing that I try to do in my head when I'm doing a map with the sea in it, but more accurate (and more realistic) than mine