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Thread: Terminology. Rugosity on borders

  1. #11

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    So the question is really, how do I get all those little channels and furrows in my contour lines? Summed up in one word by Waldronate as 'detail'. Unless you want to spend most of the rest of your life actually drawing those little lines (as Pixie said), you need to have some sort of procedural generator to do the contours for you - you can't just draw them. A procedural generator is an automated process which works out how your rivers flow and 'cuts' the contours to accommodate. You should download 'Wilbur' as Waldronate mentioned (he's very modest - he's the genius who made Wilbur - and he IS a genius). Waldronate is also responsible (I think, not sure) for most of the back end of Fractal Terrains which is sold by Pro Fantasy. If you want maps that look like that, then I would suggest you look at FT. www.profantasy.com

    There are other ways to make detailed topographical maps using photoshop or Gimp, but at your stage, if you want quick results, I would really suggest Wilbur (FREE!) or Fractal Terrains (not free but very cool and IMO easier to use).

    best

    Ravs

  2. #12
    Guild Artisan Freodin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pixie View Post
    Reading through this thread earlier today gave me just the impulse I needed to finally record a small video of my technique. It's a far to big file to share here, but I'll send it to you groovey - it should settle your curiosity
    Youtube? Youtube, please, pretty pretty please!
    (I admit that I don't have the slightest idea of how to make videos for youtube, and I can't estimate of how much work that would mean for you... but it would be awesome to see your technique in action.)

  3. #13
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Azelor: damn that vectorized sample still looks sexy as heck.

    Waldronate: I've tried Wilbur in the past as part of some tutorials and I know how awesome it is and how much potential it has if you know what you're doing, but it always felt bigger than my skills. I'll give Vol 4 a try for sure though, perhaps this time will be the one.

    Pixie: thanks for chipping it, I felt rather embarrassed to ask you about how you did it because I know some mappers don't want to share their tricks and I understand that. I didn't want to put you in an uncomfortable position. Plus I figured it would involve a lot of manual work and I was hoping for a way to get a lesser but more automated result.

    I can't believe you finally did a video! May a tutorial challenge come soon because I know I'm not the only one dying to know about your trick.

    ravells: I know who Waldronate is and what a leyend he is! I fanboyed when I noticed he had replied to my question but didn't say anything because I didn't want to make things awkward.


    Once again, thanks for the new input. I'll go and give Wilbur another chance with the tutorial Waldronate linked me to.

    EDIT: I tried the vol 4 tutorial for Wilbur and though I'm impressed with the visual results, I think it doesn't work for continental scale.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    In my world map each cm = 667 km, and Arlia (the continent above) is about 4cm long = roughly 2.668 km, so the automatic terrain I get with Wilbur is very big in scale, plus it always places the mountains in the centre of the land? Is there a work-around to reduce the scale of the terrain and place the mountains more randomly or that's imposible with Wilbur alone?

    EDIT 2: the "Ink Blots to islands using Wilbur" tut might be what I need to control when mountains appear and how big they are.

    With said tutorial I was able to turn this:

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    Into this:

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    Another alternative:

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    Pretty impressive I'd say. The scale is still too big but that's my fault, the greyscale height-map was just a quick test, I'd need to add more color/layers and make the highest altitudes smaller in scale. So pretty promising. I'll slowly work on a new greyscale template to import to Wilbur.

    Thanks!
    Last edited by groovey; 07-02-2015 at 06:28 AM.

  4. #14
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    One of the best ways to get good results with Wilbur is to get a good roughing-in of elements at a low resolution (say, 256x256), and then perform several rounds of scale-and-process to get a minimum size of around 4000x4000. If you want smaller than that, downsampling will give better results than trying to process at your final desired size. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=28052 shows some possibilities. By "scale", I mean Surface>>Resample>>Simple and double the image size. The basis of most fractal (and wavelet) synthesis is this scale-and-add process.

    You can also get good results by processing the mountain areas first (keep a selection around the mountain areas to prevent the rest of the terrain from being processed) and only doing the lowlands towards the end of the process.

    A quick "fix" for those last couple of images might be to do a Filter>>Mathematical>>Exponent operation to narrow the mountains and make the lowlands larger.

    Update: OK, I have a problem. I can't seem to pass up a heightfield. Using the scale-and-add technique yielded the attached image:
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    I went to a 4000 wide image, then downsampled it back to 1000-wide and adjusted the lighting a little (and I added a subsea not-flat thingy).
    Last edited by waldronate; 07-02-2015 at 04:52 PM.

  5. #15
    Guild Artisan Pixie's Avatar
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    It's great that you are getting the hand with Wilbur, groovey (although waldronate is thousands of hours ahead, obviously..)

    Not wanting to turn this into a thread about Wilbur, I think none of the images exported from your attempts remind me of a 3000 km wide continent. It is way too uniform. Like you said, the original grayscale for Wilbur to use needs more features. his
    Since you're active in this thread, waldronate, what's the ratio pixel to real distance that you think yields the most realistic results?

    (Have a look at this pic, it is Wilbur shader applied to srtm data of Italy, not far from 1px - 1 km)
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    As for the the continent, groovey, here's a thought about it: the continent is a break away piece of the larger land mass to the north. This means that, sometime back in geological history, that northern coast was risen and broken. It should be mountainous in a sort of ridge/plateau, along the line where the break up occurred. (Am I being clear? - check this image to understand what I am saying... HERE)
    Last edited by Pixie; 07-02-2015 at 06:27 PM.

  6. #16
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    My opinion is that Wilbur generates "good" results from about 10m/pixel to 100m/pixel. With careful processing, it can get up to around 500m/pixel; much beyond that and it's off into artistic territory.

  7. #17
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    waldronate: your touch made the original material look a lot better. I'll try to apply it when I get the new greyscale map ready to process in Wilbur, because yes Pixie, I need to reduce the scale of the blobs (for the new version, the one I posted was just a test) quite a lot; and you're absolutely right about keeping in mind the connection to the continent to its East, I'll try my best.

    Of course, I get a new lead to work on just when I land another mini job, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get my hands on it, a few days only I hope.

    Well in any case, I think I got more juicy input to work with than I imagined with my original question, so I guess I'm good to go in this "How to" section and will continue to post future development on my WIP thread, since I don't have specific doubts for now.


    Thanks a lot everybody who replied, you were really helpful to this old noob.
    Last edited by groovey; 07-03-2015 at 11:54 AM.

  8. #18
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Actually... about scale in height-map... in order not to start another topic... I agree with the general notion that big blobs are to be avoided when doing the elevation map at world scale...but then I look at a height-map of Russia... and all I see are big blobs, so are big blobs really that unrealistic?

    For comparison, Arlia is half as long (aprox) to Russia.

    I've discarded many attempts (of the elevation template to later load to Wilbur) by now because all resulted in big blobs, at least for the lowest height layers. I've even tried using real life height-maps as a base for Arlia, because what can be more realistic? And though they looked good I still discarded them because of the big blobs.

    So I'm stuck because what I see in world or continental height-maps are big blobs, which in fantasy maps are considered too big in scale and unrealistic?


    Any thoughts that could make my head clearer?

  9. #19
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    Mountainous areas come in two broad patterns: long seams that are or once were at the edges of tectonic plates (e.g. Andes, Appalachians, Urals) and broader features that result from less-localized forces at plate edges (e.g. western North America, Himalayas). The large blobs that you're seeing in the Russia maps are due to the effects of a fairly large number of small plates. Where there is a high mountainous blob that has a sharp edge and a long, sloping edge then that is a suggestion that perhaps that is a block that has been squeezed and tilted. High mountain areas with steep drop-offs on several sides can be the result of squeezing a smaller plate or uplift caused by rapid overriding of continental crust by other continental curst (the Altay mountains on the south edge of Russia are partly the result of the big mess that India made when it slammed into Asia).

    The folks locally tend to focus on long mountain chains because those are the sort that's easiest to show on simple maps and also has a long tradition in the cartography industry. Accurate relief maps of the sort that you'd get with a height map are largely an artifact of the last couple of centuries. The appearance of blobs or snakes is usually only visible on maps that show a large area. Local maps tend to focus more on local topography, if that helps.

    One thing that you already know about mountains is that they don't stop at country borders. I recommend looking at topography maps without borders (and without ice cover, if possible), because maps like the Russia map tend to chop mountain ranges in half, and that sort of thing (even if you're aware of it) tends to loom large in your perception.

  10. #20
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Yes! I've noticed the tendency in fantasy maps over here, when they're world scale, to have humongous mountain ranges, maps which otherwise usually look amazing though, so it's really easy to forgive them.
    Last edited by groovey; 07-08-2015 at 05:36 AM.

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