November Entry - A Vulcan Winter

[Greason Wolfe]

I spent a bit of time, last night and this morning, thinking about the previous render. Besides not being happy with the way the ash and soot looked, I felt there was still too much vegetation and, for some odd reason, I was getting way too much noise in the dunes areas. This led me to re-constructing the surface maps from the ground up. It also led me to a somewhat different approach as far as those surfaces went.

Given the premise that the area depicted in the map is on the outer edges of the blast zone from the Yellowstone Caldera, it seemed reasonable (with a bit of magic wand waving) that it would suffer not only from ash/soot fall, but from the heat blast as well. But I also had to keep in mind that there needed to be enough left in the aftermath that survivors of the blast would have a realistic chance of, well, survival. That got me to looking through the few dozen surface files I have for Terragen, thinking, perhaps, that something along the lines of a "badlands" or "barren" type of surface. What I found (and had completely forgotten about) was a "volcanic" surface file that, for the most part, gives the impression that molten lava has covered the surface and cooled to the point of becoming black rock. With just a tiny bit of tweaking, it became a "scorched earth" surface and served as the foundation for pretty much everything else save the dunes, the roads and the water.

Since this area is well to the east of the Yellowstone Caldera and is, at least in part, sheltered by both the Cascade and Coastal mountain ranges, it seemed fairly reasonable to assume that it would be mostly the eastern slopes that had been scorched. With this in mind, I loaded the terrain into Wilbur and created a selection based on the western slopes. After a bit of selective editing, blurring and the application of some cloud noise as an overlay, I came up with a surface distribution mask that I could use for vegetation against the western slopes and those low areas that were somewhat protected from the initial heat wave. To this, I added those areas along the edges of the lakes, creeks and streams as a means of showing how things were beginning to recover in the time that's passed since the eruption.

While still in Wilbur, I grabbed a quick selection based on elevation. With all the fine particle ash still in the air and less sunlight getting through to the surface, I needed to be able to show that the snow levels had dropped considerably. I could have done this using the elevation and slope constraints in Terragen, but those results always look odd to me. Again, a bit of selective editing, blurring and the application of some cloud noise as an overlay let me create a nice "random" looking distribution mask for the higher peaks of the area.

With all of these in place, I was able to lay in the ash/soot surface such that it gave a better impression of being what it was supposed to be. A couple minor tweaks for the roads and a few minor tweaks in the other surfaces gave me the results below, and I have to say that I am much happier with them now than I was before. One of the things I'm particularly happy with is how, after all the editing and what not, the creeks and streams have bloated slightly, giving the impression that they aren't quite as deep as they were before, but still passing along the same amount of water flow.

At this point, I'd still like to add in a few structures (shelters) to show where the survivors have gathered and how they're managing their limited resources, but with the annual Thanksgiving Family Gathering fast approaching, I'm not sure if I'll have the time. At a bare minimum, however, I will, at least, get the main labeling done and, if I get the structures in place, a simple legend to finish things off.

GW

P.S. As a side note, I still have no clue as to where all the noise came from in the dunes areas during the previous render. I used the same settings for this render, but the noise has, much to my pleasure, disappeared. One of these days, I'll have to take a closer look at that surface file and see if I can figure it out.

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[Steel General]

Neat stuff here GW!