Aug / Sept '17 Lite Challenge: Mackabie-on-the-Sea

[Bioluminescence]

Hello! My first entry ever here.

This is Mackabie-on-the-Sea, a quiet little village that primarily fishes, but does a bit of smallholding. Mostly, the little monastery on the hill is the primary feature - a place devoted to the care of cats. Dozens of moggies live on the island (and thus, not much else due to their predations) and many of them accompany the fishing boats out on their trips.

I was inspired by images of various Croatian villages, thus I named it for the Croatian word for cat: mačka. I have no idea how that's pronounced.

### Latest WIP ###


My process images:

This was my first scribble, trying to get a rough topography and layout. If I were sensible, I would have continued with this. Instead, for some mad reason (I blame /r/papertowns) I decided to go a bit 3d with it.


My handmade heightmap. When I imported this to Unreal (UE4) it was all kinds of noisy and bumpy. I'd never really made a heightmap before, and I'm not some fancy person with WorldMachine or anything. Alas.
Still - this got me close enough to work with. My river was all kinds of wrong though.


This is what I threw down in Unreal to get a rough layout. Had to fix the river, flatten out areas for my box houses and the monastary, add a bridge placeholder, etc. Also smooth out the whole thing, as I mentioned.
I ran around it in first person to see how the scale was, but I think it's a bit big for that really.

And that's it so far!

I'm having real trouble with the trees and foliage. As you can maybe see in the original scribble, I wanted to have some small, terrace-style, fields on some of the slopes, but I'm at a bit of a loss how to start on them. I imagine I'll just... start, hate it, and keep going until I don't hate it. This is my first attempt at a stylized copse, and I kind of hate/love it. It's very complicated.