The Burpwallow Coast

[su_liam]

So I started putting together a piece of land to play with Ravells' river method here. This started out as just a quick and dirty map and developed into something I'm very proud of.

The rivers didn't work so well for me, so I just made them using my tablet(niiice tablet).

Anyway, I started with my standard lazy method of Clouds filter followed by Difference Clouds till I liked the look. Using the original noise I found the high area was roughly in the SE corner and most of the land was covered with small lakes until I set the threshold so high that I had small islands.

I created a layer with Pin Light blending mode. I don't use this mode much, because I don't really know what it is, but it worked great here. I drew in a very light grey over the areas I wanted to have as land. I then set the brush to Linear Light mode and painted in a somewhat darker grey(still >12 around the edges and in areas I wanted a little higher.

I then made another layer in Multiply mode to lower the areas where I wanted sea. I also used it to flatten out some of my lowlands. Multiply is a very nice mode. Not only does it lower altitudes, it also smooths, in a way, by reducing slopes(e.g. if you have a region at height 16 next to an area at height 4, multiplying by 1/2 will give you 8 and 2 which also reduces the difference from 12 to 6).

I created a channel and used Lighting Effects on land based on this HF, but I found it a little too uniform.

Now I created my land mask with a threshold layer. I used a levels layer to span the levels on land from 0 to 255. On the Input levels I set the far left to just below my sea level threshold(that's the black point), the far right(my white point) I set as low as I could with out forcing too many of my high points to white, and the middle point(I don't know the term) I pushed a bit to white, flattenning the lowland areas. I saved this HF as a PGM for later. I also saved it to a separate channel.

Lighting Effects based on this modified HF looked really good to me. There were distinctive deposition-flattened lowlands. Ya'a'te! I ended up applying my new hillshading at

Now I created a gradient layer with the land threshold as it's layer mask. This was a pretty simple hypsometric gradient from dark green to white. Based on the heightfield, of course.

I inverted the land mask to use as a layer mask for my ocean areas. This made a nice pattern I thought suggested waves on shallows and reefs. I liked it.

What I had at this point looked nice enough to be worth more work, but still lacked life. A few days previously I had made a good tiling pattern out of a picture of the cliff rocks in a cut near my home. I decided to apply them as an overlay to my map. Two layers filled with my rock pattern one was applied to land with a layer mask at 100% opacity Overlay mode, the other applied to sea with a 50% opacity Overlay. If I had it to do again I would have used an inverted HF on the sea to show more of the rock pattern where the water was shallow(no biggie, live and learn).

I saved the combined color image without shading. Well actually, I cheated a little and used a very low opacity shading with my original HF in order to add some interest to the lowlands. This might have worked better had I used the same light direction as I used in Bryce.

I then created another layer in screen mode with a Bevel and Emboss Layer Effect. I created a layer mask for this and tried Ravells' tut out. I wasn't altogether happy with the Bezierish rivers I got, so I just used my tablet. At some point I apparently turned off pressure sensitivity for my size control. Grrr... But, I was tired, so I gave up.

I quickly created a greyscale image based on the white-ocean black land threshold combined with the river mask for an initial specularity channel. On the ocean and river portion I applied a Cloud filter with the FG set to white and BG set to about 40% grey. I used Levels to bias this a bit to white. I also applied clouds to land in a black to dark grey range.

I imported the pgm of my HF into Bryce. I then used the color image I had saved as the Diffuse and Ambient Color channels and the Specularity greyscale image as the Specularity Value channel for my terrain's material.

I then went into the Terrain Editor. I added Basic Noise, Height Noise and Slope Noise and then I ran the Erode effect a bit. This I smoothed slightly and added some more Slope Noise. Then I eroded it some more. I did not use the Eroded effect, it has some odd artifacts I'm trying to avoid and tends to kind of eat the original HF more than I wanted.

I then rendered with my camera pulled way back with a narrow FOV looking straight down. The rendered image I saved and brought back into PS.

I pasted my Bryce image in under my rivers layer and inverted the light direction in the Bevel and Emboss effect on my rivers layer. I used some Adjustment Layers to desaturate and pretty up the result and here it is.

I may have to do a tut on the method I used here for HF manipulation. If I trusted photoshop's 16-bit coverage I'd say this could be at least as good as what I could do with Leveller. Of course, I know what I'm doing in PS which I can't say of Leveller.

My next stage will be playing with labels. After that, it's back to Ansium.

[Sigurd]

This is gorgeous! I love bleak coastline.


Sigurd

[Hinaloth]

So beautyful ... wish I could do such thing!

But the line on the ground seems like giant roots... Is yggdrasil in the nearby?

[SpamValiant]

Gorgeous. I'll be impatiently waiting to see the expanded tutorial on this one.

I can get an idea of the process from what you've already written but breaking it down a little more would be immensely useful. I'm sure there are many of us here who would love to be able to use this kind of technique in our own maps

[ravells]

Me too! Tutorial please! I'd really like to get a better grasp of the early part of the process.

Lovely work, Su Liam!!

[Midgardsormr]

Very nice! I really like this coastline, and it's so rare to see good bathymetry like that. I think I'll be coming back to this post later to see if I can duplicate what you've done. And I'll echo the others: more details!

It's really been a delight reading your posts. A lot of the technical discussion goes over my head, but I learn just a little bit each time I read it. So many thanks to you, Redrobes, Monks, Waldronate, and anyone else who's been involved in those tech talks.

[torstan]

Agreed, that's very pretty - especially the mountains. The sharp shadows make them look very authentic.

Just one thing that doesn't quite sit right - the shading along the coast line looks like a drop shadow from the sea on to the land. Now I've seen it I can't help but see the sea as above the land - which feels very strange.

Have some rep for an excellent walkthrough - though of course that shouldn't stop you from going into more detail in the tutorials thread.

[su_liam]

* Not quite ready for a tutorial yet. Stealing time as it is.

* I'm not quite sure what Hinaloth is saying about a line on the ground, though I'm curious.

* I'm really, really honored to be referred to in the same place as Redrobes, Monks and Waldronate. Thank you so much.

* The problem, Torstan, is that I have some subtle shading embedded in my colormap itself. Building a bumpmap for Bryce can get complicated and I was tired. It would have worked better if my Lighting Effects weren't lit from exactly the opposite direction as my Bryce render. In PS I used NW illumination, in Bryce I used SE illumination. Me ineptum. I rattled off a quick rerender with more appropriate illumination below. Thanks for the rep.

In the near future, I'll start this process over from scratch, both to see if I can replicate my results and to create a tutorial. Till then, here's ammunition, a little water, I have some chips if you need 'em. Hold out as long as you can my friends...!

p.s. I think I found the line Hinaloth is referring to. Apparently I didn't make my rock texture quite as tileable as I thought. Annoying...

[torstan]

That's done the trick. Looks great.

[Torq]

Great looking coastline su_liam! Very authentic and totally cool. I preferred the de-aturated look of the first map though, but I suppose thats just personal.

Torq