February 2022 Challenge: Tour Carmen!
So this is not the first time I've mapped Carmen and it won't be the last. Since this challenge was to redo an old map, I asked my cowriter to choose between Almaera or Carmen, our two sister planets, and I'm testing out a new workflow in this map.
The very first came from...
Which came from a pencil sketch which I no longer have, but is an accurate representation of the sketch's humor.
Later I made this one, for an earlier challenge ("Sisters") which represents the evolution of the setting into a slightly more serious tone, but not totally.
And finally this one, which I feel is a fairly accurate portrayal of the worldbuilding for Carmen to date, but it serves as more of a tourist brochure than a detailed geographical map.
So, I've decided to redo TOUR HOLY CARMEN as if it were represented on a satellite of 3D terrain, as a more realistic, modern, detailed topography map.
So first I had to build a height map, something that went horribly wrong last time I built one for a challenge here. Just did NOT work out at all. But people seem to be interested in process too so I'm showing what it came from anyway.
And make no mistake, I had some trouble with it this time too. I used World Creator to convert my sketch of a height map into one with more interesting wear and tear, running it through several different erosion and worldbuilding techniques... which all ultimately ended in me losing the island chains I'd doodled in the first draft as well as all indication of the rivers. Sigh. Still haven't managed to get those back in as I continued and made that map into a colored and textured variation.
Not to mention I crashed the program multiple times, lost my entire first go at it, and GUASIJFFG we shall never speak of this again.
The battle with world creator left me with this screenshot and the height maps shown above.
Then I brought the height map into blender, subdivided a plane and used the height map to displace it.
Then I added the color/texture version which I made by painting and texture sandwiching it in Clip Studio Paint with the screenshotted version from WC, which is basically halfway to a finished map as it is. Honestly, if I didn't want to fool around with Blender I would have called this a day.
So yeah, I then tried to use that to give the 3D map color and texture.
Which of course also didn't work as well as planned and resulted in several things going wrong and honestly let's not talk about it but here's some proof that it really is 3D.
Anyway, I ended up rendering a couple different lighting variations and combining them in Clip Studio Paint, which means I won't be able to do what I was hoping for the final unless I start getting real convoluted, but right now, this is now a raster result based on a couple of sandwiched versions on blend modes. We'll see.
You can see from the "see it's actually 3D" the 3D version's coloring and also that it starts to lose resolution when you zoom in on it, thanks to the limitations of subdivisions in a plane versus World Creator's specialized rendering machine. But, I don't want to finish it in WC because I don't like how the texture engine works and you can't do any animating or whatnot.
So right now, this is the working 'final' and the one I'll want to appear in the WIP thread... but it won't do that if I don't post it as its own post, I think.
### Latest WIP ###
