[wip] The Isle of Cathava

[waldronate]

I didn't keep the MDR file. It only takes a couple of minutes to generate it so there didn't seem much need. It was pretty much a basin fill followed by selecting everything above 0 followed by a uniform noise of 10 followed by a height clip between 0.1 and 100000. Then a basin fill and river run to get the river mask.

The final image was assembled in Photoshop from bits and pieces made in Wilbur as per the Wilbur Rivers and Lakes tutorial. The only things I did differently were to use the basins image and select only the lakes I wanted, turn that image into a black and white mask, then feed it back into Wilbur as a selection mask for another Basin Delta round.

I keep hoping to get some new features into Wilbur that would simplify this sort of thing but I just can't seem to get the magic combination of free time and enthusiasm at the same instant.

The next step would be to extract the colors from the base map you were using and set those colors as the height information followed by slapping a contour shader on top of that.

There isn't a good way to export the vector contours from Wilbur. Note that you can take the MDR that you modified in Wilbur and then put it back into FT as a new world as shown in http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/ThereandBackAgain/ - just fudge the boundaries so that the top and bottom are at +/- 90 and the left and right at whatever place is appropriate to keep the image aspect ratio. All of the FT tools including river finding will then be available with effectively greatly increased resolution. Note that some of the tools won't be semantically correct (great circle distance computations, for example, will be totally meaningless; climate, temperature, rainfall, etc., will also be incorrect), but most of the tools don't try to deal with context too much.

[Brennall]

Well that all took longer than I hoped!

The good news is I managed to recreate the results Waldronate got in Wilbur and generate some lakes and rivers successfully. Although I kept on getting straightline rivers eventually by experimenting with higher and higher values of noise finally managed to get some wiggly rivers!

I pulled two things out of Wilbur, first there was the rivers (click on image for more detail): -



The reason the rivers are against a black background is so I can easily extract them by selecting the colour black and deleting it, leaving just the rivers.

Then there were the Basins, destined to become lakes. (click on image for more detail): -



Once again to ease extraction they are against a black background.

Obviously there were far to many basins, so after some pruning I arrived at what I considered to be a reasonable number of lakes as you can see in the next image: -



From that point on it was merely working out how to represent them on the Terrrain map and the Contour Map as you will soon see.

I simplified and reduced the scale bar on the map and was happier with the result, and finally I bordered the maps to finish them off.

Here is the finished Contour Map: -



Click here for the full size map (2.5mb)

There was slight shadowing on the rivers to make them stand out and the Lakes also had a minor photoshop treatment to highlight their edges.

Finally the Terrain map: -



Click here for the full size map (2.5mb)

The rivers in the terrain map are only visible in the unforested areas (as one would expect) and can be seen better in the lower south easter section of the map.

With these two maps complete, I have to consider the policital map next. This will be especially critical as I am planning on using Birthright rules to run a "meta" campaign and control all the countries.

I still am not quite sure as to a good example of map style to adopt for the political map, if anyone has any examples or recommendations I would be interested.

Brennall