Hearthstone Saga - WIP

[Greason Wolfe]

Yes that's a lot nicer looking, for sure. Hopefully the technique doesn't take too much extra rendering time for the full one.

The snow portion didn't add too much time. The real time hog is when I crank the extra blending and ultra sub-pixel smoothing up. The last full render (at 12 by 12) took a little over 5 hours to complete. I imagine that when I go for the full sized version of the map, I'll be looking at roughly 15 to 20 hours, unless I stick with simple fast sub-pixel smoothing.

You've brought it along quite far from the image I initially commented on, the transitions from one mountain to the other are much better now.

Like I mentioned before, the transitions were there as far as elevation went, it was a matter of getting them to show through on the basis of coloring.

looking pretty nice.. first I saw just snowy holes in the ground.. had to stare it for a while to see the snowy mountaintops.

That's probably due to the lighting source. I've got the sun set for a mid afternoon render from a slightly southern point. We've had this discussion about a couple of other maps and, or so it seems to me, most maps that include shading are "rendered" with the sun to the east rather than the west and, again so it seems, from a more northerly point. In any event, lighting sources from unusual angles do that to me regularly as well. Add to that the fact that, sometimes, I'm half-blind, and you can imagine how badly it messes me up.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

So, now that I have the basis of the coloring worked out for Terragen, I've been spending little bits and pieces of time re-working the mountains to include some exceptional peaks and fill in some of the "empty" areas that existed in the map as a whole, thus designating those areas that might be barren or desert-like. I have, however, hit a bit of a snag.

There is one area that I would like to make a plateau out of as a means of helping to define a gorge-like area. This could prove difficult base on the way I am building the height field. I have a couple of ideas regarding my approach to this particular task, but I think it is going to come down to using Wilbur, selecting the area in question, flattening it, then sending it back to the graphics editor for the building of other elevations on the plateau. Alternatively, I may be able to select based on elevation in Wilbur, save the selection and use it as a pseudo-mask to build on. Regardless of how I approach the process, it's gonna mean a few extra layers in the height field build which, in turn, may push my system resources a little too high. Guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

To that end, it may be a day or two before I manage to post a real update as I try to wrap my head around this problem and come up with a viable solution given the software I'm using. I'll try to post an update without the plateau depending on how things go with trying to build it. In the mean time, I'm open to other thoughts and/or suggestions on how I might approach this particular task.

GW

P.S. It just hit me. The whole select by elevation in Wilbur is the way to go. All I'll have to do is flatten the selected area to the lowest elevation of the selection, save it as a separate .png file, then load it as a separate layer so that I can magic wand the area in my graphics editor and do a quick fill before continuing the build. It will still mean a few extra layers, but not as many as I was originally thinking.

[Jykke]

Building a terrain is a hard job, especially when you try to set it up in a particular way.

[Greason Wolfe]

It most definitely is, and I've been building this one from the ocean floor up. But it's all good and helping me define processes and techniques that I was struggling with earlier.

GW