The Western Kingdoms - by Greason Wolfe

[Greason Wolfe]

Once again, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here at the Guild. There have been family health issues, work issues, motivational issues, and so on. In all honesty, these last two or three years have been, to put it mildly, rough. I think, though, or at least I hope, I am finally back with a new project entitled The Western Kingdoms.

And I’m trying something a little different for me.

For any of you that have followed my work in the past, you probably know that I have a tendency to lean towards rendering my maps in Terragen with a little (well, maybe a lot) of help from Wilbur, with a smattering of FTPro and graphical editing. One of the major downfalls of that approach, at least for me, has always been how long it takes. I’d spend hours, days, a week or more working in Wilbur in an effort to get my mountains looking good. Then there would be even more time laying out the rivers and lakes. Forests. Hills. Deserts. All those wonderful terrain features to make a map look complete. And, lastly, the rendering process in Terragen. It could take hours, and if I wasn’t happy with the results, there would be even more hours adjusting the coloring and rendering angles. In a nutshell, I’d reach a “burn-out” point and abandon the project all together.

The difference this time is that rather than trying to put everything together in a single render, I’m going to render individual bits and pieces of the map and put them together the way most people here do via layers in my graphics editor. I’m hoping that by only focusing on smaller, individual pieces of the map I won’t hit that “burn-out” stage.

Wish me luck.

As a sign of my good intentions, here is what I’ve accomplished so far (at about half the actual size of the file I'm working with). I’ve got the basic land masses laid out along with some smaller islands. I’ve also shaded and textured the ocean/seas a little bit, though I’m not sure if I’m 100% happy with the “wave” effect along the coasts just yet. On the whole, though, I’m generally happy with the way things are looking so far, and the good thing is, I have quite a few notes on where most of the significant terrain features are going to go. I can't make any promises as to how frequently I'll be updating this project, but if things go well, I should have more to show in just a few days.

Again, though, wish me luck.

GW