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Thread: A map to accompany a story

  1. #21
    Guild Adept Valarian's Avatar
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    Ravs, I like the new look of the mountains. The forests now ride the contours and look good also. One thing, I've lost where the settlements are. I think that the symbols representing settlements need to be raised above the terrain, and made bolder to stand out.
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  2. #22

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    Thanks everyone!

    the specularity really got to me as well, I reduceed it to zero in Bryce, but I think you're right Arcana, It'll need more managing. Thanks Rob about the lighting direction...that makes sense as the shadows won't obscure the map too much, and a fill light sounds like a damn good idea too - and yep, the mountains are way too big and lumpy. Valarian: the settlement markers are not actually there (I forgot to paste them back in!).

    A number of thoughts occured to me on the way to work this morning:

    I could try using the default heightmap of the bryce terrain to make a brush in psp, so I could dot 'little mountains' around the place to get a vague Erwin Raisz effect.

    Other thoughts: using an airbrush to paint in the mountain locations rather than the paintbrush / gaussian blur, the softness of the edge of the airbrush ought to determine the gradient of the slope.

    Using different noise patterns to get different mountain effects, such as a 'brocolli' shaped flat plateau. By using a dark airbrush, you should be able to trace canyons for the rivers to go through.

    So much potential! I'm going to continue to play with this all weekend I think! I'll post results up if anything interesting comes out of it. RobA - any chance of that noisefill you used?

    Rob, one thing I did do (as suggested in the shaded relief site) was render the map at an angle and then used the perspective tool in psp to make the map square again. Is that what you did as well?

    The thing I really LOVE about this approach is that I can import my existing map as a layer into PSP and use it as a visual reference so that I can put the mountains exaclty where I want and then as a mask to stop the mountains overspilling into the sea or over the border (as they have done in the map posted above as the mask idea hadn't occured to me).

    Cheers!

    Ravs

  3. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by ravells View Post
    I could try using the default heightmap of the bryce terrain to make a brush in psp, so I could dot 'little mountains' around the place to get a vague Erwin Raisz effect.
    ooh - I like that idea. And with size and rotation jitter it could be fairly randomized! If you do this, please post the hf or the brush!

    Quote Originally Posted by ravells View Post
    Other thoughts: using an airbrush to paint in the mountain locations rather than the paintbrush / gaussian blur, the softness of the edge of the airbrush ought to determine the gradient of the slope.
    Just add noise and optionally displacement distortion afterwards to get rid of the smoothness. That works OK, but I know I never had the skill drawing by hand to get the results I wanted.

    Quote Originally Posted by ravells View Post
    Rob, one thing I did do (as suggested in the shaded relief site) was render the map at an angle and then used the perspective tool in psp to make the map square again. Is that what you did as well?
    I didn't want to loose detail by distorting it so I leveraged the camera options in POV, so no transform was required:

    I set the camera really far away, with a really long zoom, right on the z-axis. This generated what looked like an orthagonal areal view. I then set the output resolution to a square and adjusted the camera's aspect ratio to distort the image to fill the square.

    -Rob A>

  4. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by ravells View Post
    RobA - any chance of that noisefill you used?
    It was the stock render clouds.

    -Rob A>

  5. #25

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    Cheers I'll try a variety of fill types including clouds. I was using 'HSB Jiggle'. If I get anything helpful, I'll post up the heightfield so we can start to build up some brushes.

    POV seems ahead of Bryce, I don't think I can set the aspect ratio for the bryce camera to anything but a rectangle...but I'll check. Being able to to that will minimise distortion and save another step.

    (note to self: try mesh fill in DP for mask)

  6. #26

  7. #27

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    I feel like Luke Skywalker in the bloody trench...'stay on target...stay on target'...I'm getting there with this, but still don't think I have the right underlying noise to make the mountains. The colours have all gone doo lally with this but the mountains are getting there.
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  8. #28
    Community Leader pyrandon's Avatar
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    Wow, ravs--that last post upped the ante a lot! Excellent work!!

    (Do I smell a tutorial arising from this....? I hope so!)
    Don
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  9. #29
    Guild Adept Valarian's Avatar
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    Oh yes ... that's good. That's very good. I like that ... a lot.
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  10. #30

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    I'm also liking the look of that! I think you are almost there...

    -Rob A>

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