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.