Re-Building the Mountains
Being on the road this last week, and armed with a printed copy of the Hearthstone Saga map as it stood in my last post, gave me some time to think about how things were progressing with the project, and one of the things that was bothering me was the look of the mountains in general. When I originally envisioned the project, I saw the mountains (particularly the Kreimyrs) as having a folded, more ridge-like appearance. Looking at my copy of the map, that just didn't seem to come across very well, so I've been endeavoring to rebuild them such that they reflected the aforementioned appearance.
Rather than relying wholly upon Gaussian Blurs and Overlay Blends to create the masks used to define the mountains, I started looking at incorporating a bit of Motion Blur as well. The difficult part has been getting a sense of definition to the ridges, and I may need to tweak things just a bit more, but now I feel that although there is still some "chunkiness" to the mountains, I am much closer to the folded look that I was hoping for.
Beyond that, there are two situations that I'm trying to take a closer look at. One of those situations has to do with the overall land slope. It occurred to me that with a land form that is basically flat with the exception of the mountains and such, I may end up with some odd river runs when I let Wilbur do its erosion thing. I've got a simple solution for that, however, and will implement it a bit later on in the project.
The second situation has to do with the implementation of a gorge-like area. I haven't decided exactly where it will be just yet, however, I believe that the implementation of the effect won't be overly difficult. My current thought is to create a secondary mask that will be applied to each of the elevation masks used to create the elevation model as a whole. I will, of course, have to experiment with things a bit just to make sure that it "blends in" properly.
On a side note, I did manage to tweak the surface maps for Terragen a bit and am getting closer to the right look for what I see in my head. There are a few colors though (and "textures" for that matter) that aren't quite where I want them yet. Still, I've only put in maybe four hours of actual work on the map as a whole and have to say that I am still very happy with the progress so far.
On another side note, I've selected the area where the story/adventures are most likely to begin and am in the process of cutting it out for a more detailed view. The area, Tyrendale, is a small mining/farming town located in the coastal range of mountains. I hope to have a rough version of that map up later this afternoon or, perhaps, tomorrow. Since it will be more of a local/town setting, I'll probably drop it into the City/Town Maps forum and add cross-over links between it's thread and this one.
In the meantime, here is the latest render. For the sake of detail, I used the full resolution version of the terrain file and rendered it at 33% (16 x 16 inches) of the intended final size, which should be roughly 48 x 48 inches, just to see how things looked on a grand level. There's still a lot of empty space to work with, and I've plans to drop in three exceptional mountain peaks once I've decided where the final "chapter" takes place. Beyond that, I'll probably add in some low mountains and hills in some of those empty spaces and then let Wilbur have its way with the file just to see where the rivers end up. That should give me a better idea of where settlements and forests are.
As always, comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome, especially if anyone happens to see something that doesn't quite make sense or the potential for something unusual that could be added in.
GW
P.S. Thanks to my crummy dial-up connection, I keep timing out trying to load the 16 x 16 version of the map, so will have to settle for the 12 x 12 version. I really can't wait for FioS to become available in my little corner of the world.
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Originally Posted by Greason Wolfe
