Return to Haevenstadt - WIP

[Greason Wolfe]

After considerable thought (as well as a whole lot of experimentation and research), I've decided to return to the Haevenstadt Project. The biggest influence pushing me back to this project was the fact that I'd already researched and detailed quite a bit of the background behind this particular world (or part of the world as the case may be). With somewhere around 400 pages worth of information (basic religious, folklore, language, historical, geographical, astronomical, astrological and creation both physical and mythical), it was really the only decision that made sense. I'll work at presenting some of that information (along with some of the techniques I'm using) as I progress through the actual mapping process.

For the time being, I wanted to post the updated version of the original map I had been using for this project. One of the big changes was the overall area represented by the map. The world on which Haevenstadt is located is a rather large world (think in terms of twice the size of Earth). With that in mind, the area detailed below takes up about 1/3rd of the northern hemisphere ranging from the 15th to the 76th parallels. This is going to give me a lot of space to work with, so I should be able to get fairly detailed with things. Another thing to keep in mind is that I'll be rebuilding the actual elevations to better represent a combination of both the physical and mythological events that have shaped the world. That is going to take some time, but, now that I've finished up with much of my experimentation in combining FTPro, Wilbur and Terragen, should move along smoothly enough that it won't take forever. ( Famous last words, yes? ).

In any event, no major labeling yet, but the land masses are fairly stabilized now, though I will be tweaking them slightly as needed to better represent some of the roughness along the coastal regions.

GW

[Steel General]

The only thing that I can 'nit-pick' about is the texture for the oceans - just doesn't work for me.

... But that's just my opinion.

[vman3force]

maybe clouding over the oceans some would help that?

[Greason Wolfe]

As far as the sea texture goes, that's just a rough for the time being based on FTPro and one of the coloring schemes from the Terraformer Plug-in. It's not at all finalized, but I prefer that coloring scheme for the land colors over most others. Once I've set a few more things, I'll most definitely be working on that coloring scheme. In the meantime, here is a bit of an update after fiddling around with things in Wilbur and Terragen. Mind you, it's still very rough and mostly for a sense of where I'm going to have to go with things as far as Wilbur and Terragen are concerned. For the sake of "continental shelves" I did change the water coloring scheme around a bit, but again, it is only a rough version for the time being.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Just for the sake of curiosity, I rendered the previous post through Terragen just to see what I'd get. The surface maps are just slapped together for now, but I have to say that everything looks as though it is going to work the way I hoped it would. Seeing as how I have to work tonight, I'll take a look at where I want my major mountain chains to be as well as any sea cliffs. I'm certain there are some other areas I am going to have to take a closer look at, and, of course, there will be the distribution masks at some point (particularly for lakes and rivers) but I won't lay those out until I have a better idea where the mountains are.

GW

[Syt]

I have to say that I like the first version's terrain best, but the sea texture just seems oppressively dark. I would go for something more like "baby blue" or "sky blue" myself, but that's a matter of personal taste.

[Greason Wolfe]

I have to say that I like the first version's terrain best, but the sea texture just seems oppressively dark. I would go for something more like "baby blue" or "sky blue" myself, but that's a matter of personal taste.

Oh, most definitely. The first version of the terrain is better. The last two posts were just roughs with a Terragen generated elevation file in place of the original elevations. Long range goal is to incorporate a grey-scale version of the original elevation file as part of a mask to control the wider variety of hills and valleys generated by TG. Since Wilbur allows me to save file formats usable by both TG and FTPro, my hope is to produce a terrain model that looks essentially the same in both with the obvious exception of TG renders being more photo-realistic.

Speaking of which, it's back to the grindstone after a little nap. Long night at work and this lil wolfie needs his beauty (or is that furry) sleep.

As a side note, the sea coloring in the first version is meant more for use with climate models in FTPro as opposed to using them as an elevation file. The Terraformer Plug-in by Bill Roach is aimed in that direction for the most part as a means of trying to get results that look a bit more like Earth does in satellite imagery. I rather like that plug-in, but it takes a bit of work as far as building/controlling climate models in FTPro.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

It's been a couple days since I last posted and, believe it or not, I haven't been completely idle. For the most part, I've been setting up the elevation layers, but I took some time today to lay out the major rivers of the world. We're not talking those little things that slice through a city or along it's edge. Nope, we're talking the truly awe inspiring rivers. I'll be adding in the smaller rivers a little later on. Of course, I still have to work out a few details about how I'm going to cut them in when it comes to Terragen, but I did render them quickly in FTPro just to see how they looked at this point.

In essence, what I did was let FTPro plot out the rivers to begin with based on the original elevations that it rendered. From there, I saved a number of versions of the world as sphere map images (a colorized version and several black and white versions with and without shading), then it was off to editing in PSP. A lot of the rivers rendered by FTPro went in the waste basket along with several lakes. Then there were a few that were changed, adding length here, re-routing there and the like. Finally, I dropped in a couple two or three elevation layers, masked them out with simple gradients and sent the whole package off to Wilbur to get a basic idea of how things were looking. A quick .mdr save and import into FTPro gave me an even better idea of how things were looking.

Going back to the coloring scheme I used in the first post, the results are shown below. Eventually I'll have to break down and set up a better coloring scheme, but this is doing the job for now.

I think I will be going back and re-working the ocean areas. I'd really like to hammer out the continental shelves and what not as well as a few trenches. Again, however, things are still in early development. I've had a couple of concerns about the area I'm working with. In hindsight, I'm wondering if I've spread it across enough of the world as a whole. One thought is to extend it to the poles and let it take up an entire hemisphere instead of just part of a hemisphere, but I'll deal with that a bit later on, once I've decided just how many cultures might be involved. A combination of Norse, Celtic and Irish cultures is definitely involved, but I'm thinking that I might want to include something involving Egyption, Babylonian and/or Sumerian as well.

Comments, Criticisms and Suggestions are, as always, welcomed.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

In trying to tweak things out for this map, I opted to stretch the known world of Haevenstadt such that it became the full world rather than just a portion of it. I might have done this sooner, but I hadn't installed my new monitor. Now that I've accomplished that project (along with a new sound system) I've managed to get back to work on things.

One thing I'm not 100% happy with is the sea coloring still. Well, not so much the coloring, but more the shading. I'll have to work on that a bit more and, perhaps, extend the continental shelves. My main goal, though, was to get things stretched out and placed properly which, I think, I've managed to do. From here, I should be able to place my main mountain chains, work up some basic wind and water currents and then calculate some basic rainfall amounts so that my rivers will be based on these things rather than personal aesthetics.

All in all, I'm still happy with the general progress of things and it seems that I've got FTPro, Wilbur and Terragen communicating with each other fairly well at this point. One of the things I might play with, once I've laid out the main mountain chains, is a few FTPro export scripts based on elevation as a means of creating some quick masks for use in building up the roughness of the world through Terragen and Wilbur.

Edit : As an afterthought, I did an FTPro render without any shading for the oceans just to see what it looked like. Not sure which version I prefer, but added it in below for other opinions.

GW

[Steel General]

There's a link here somewhere to a site that focuses on color schemes, might be worth taking a look at that. Maybe you'll find something that works better for you.

On these last two, the cyan color is very bright (nearly neon) and tends to overpower everything else.