Ethran: Merelan City

[Mouse]

Hey Jo

Its not finished yet - Now its my turn to spend a few days drawing and pasting trees (and quite a few tents as well)!

The book and the novel have become inextricably tangled in my mind, so now I must finish the maps before I can finish the tale.

Thanks for the encouragement and the compliment

[Mouse]

Well... I think I've cracked the dead trees - the dead and fire blackened oak trees by the pyre anyway

Trees.jpg

I would like to do more than just three basic variations, now that I've got the hang of it, but since time is of the essence, and I already have what I need to create all the dead trees I need on the island, I will move on to the more leafy variations

[Josiah VE]

Those trees look awesome, nice job.

[Mouse]

Aw - thanks Josiah

[Mouse]

Another winter/dead tree, but not as successful this time. Its meant to be an aspen (or a birch tree, if you prefer), but the smaller spread of the tree when viewed from above, and the finer nature of its structure in comparison to the large oaks I did before means that most of the detail is lost in a map like MC when it doesn't have any foliage on it.

Trees2.JPG

This image is a zoom level too far for the ground textures of the map itself, which are starting to pixelate at this range. The trees are in comparison still very much in focus with some way to go before they start to pixelate. I made them hi-res because I want to be able to use them at any scale I chose in the future - battle maps included.

EDIT: an improved render of the same area with the aspen placed beneath the oak trees and the intensity of the shadows reduced to a more sensible level - following the advice from a friend of mine on another forum ...

Trees3.JPG

[waldronate]

One way to quickly trim out the twiggier bits and keep the overall skeleton of the tree is by using a max (or min; I get those confused) filter on the image. It will quickly remove the thinnest structures while leaving the thicker ones intact. After the max filter, apply the min filter as much as you applied the max filter and your tree will be back to its original size with just the thinner bits removed. This technique might be most effective if applied to a mask of the tree rather than the raw tree image and then using that mask image to clean up the tree. I mention this because it's a technique that will often preserve the essential nature of tree without just turning it into a fuzzy blob at lower resolutions.

That sounded overly confusing, didn't it? I'll try to remember to spend a bit of time writing a couple of simple morphological effects for CC3+ (basically min and max over an area) to enable this sort of thing more quickly and directly in the software.

[Mouse]

Hey Waldronate

I'm not anywhere near as brainy as you are, and relatively easy to confuse, so being confused is a sort of normal state for me, and probably nothing to do with what you said. Don't worry - I'm used to it LOL

I do have a question, however, since you seem to be talking about a whole new level of tools hidden somewhere within CC3. Where might I find these here max and min filters? As you can gather, I still haven't completely explored all the possibilities yet

EDIT: Ah! I read your post again and again till I realised I got completely the wrong end of the stick (maybe). You were talking about PS filters maybe? I don't have PS.

I'm still using a very broken version of CorelDraw that keeps crashing whenever it has an argument over active memory allocation with Win 10, and the max/min filters on that are... um... rather a lot out of date and relatively crude - 10-15 years out of date, I think. (Yes, I know its a dinosaur - but a dinosaur that enables me to draw trees, nonetheless LOL)

[waldronate]

I haven't written a min or max effect for CC3+ yet, so there's not one in there yet and probably won't be until at least the next official update (probably around the time that the Cosmographer 3 update comes out). I have an unfortunate habit of thinking about things in public that I haven't yet quite accomplished.

I was thinking of using something like Photoshop, which has those filters. Unfortunately, my Photoshop machine is currently being used for the purposes of petty local politics, so I'll try to do something with Wilbur, which has a very rough implementation of this sort of thing. The Wilbur filters give a blocky rendition of the concept, but converting the above image to grayscale, roughly picking out the dark tree area, doing the max and min process described above, and then using that image to show the affected area on top of the original image shows very poorly that the thinner bits got removed:

Untitled_edited.jpg

Not suitable for any real purpose, but I was using the wrong tool for the job and I didn't start with the source material that would be most amenable to this sort of processing.

EDIT: The filters in Wilbur are about 20 years old, so I do understand fighting using stone-tipped spears.

[Mouse]

OH MY!.... You have no idea how GORGEOUS that is as an image in its own right - when you forget what it is and take it as an abstract! I could quite easily frame it and put it on my wall!

(Sorry I get a bit distracted by patterns and subtle changes in colour - typical Aspie!)

I see what you mean about the max/min thing, and I think there is probably a way of doing it by reducing the mask in the CPT image before I export it to PNG format for symbol use. I may have to do that, just for the MC map, but I will have a think about it and see what they look like once I've got a few on there with leaves on them.

Thank you ever so much for taking the time and trouble to create that work of art for me

[Mouse]

Well... I have a foliage solution...

After spending about a week trying out various splodging techniques with various fixed 'brushes' in my archaic version of Corel Photopaint, I didn't really have anything to show for it, except a few reasonably attractive blob shapes. I just couldn't seem to get the leafiness right.

Then I remembered I had Vue Pioneer and started messing around with the trees in that, till I came up with a solution. Its a bit limited because I only have so many kinds of trees in the free version, and none of them seem to be the ones that I want. However, there are distinct pluses to using Vue, which during rendering allows you to simultaneously create a pin-sharp alpha mask, so there are no transparency problems (unless you forget to turn the ground behind the tree in the 3D scene completely transparent and non reflective, and zero the atmosphere settings to get rid of haze and fog etc).

Here is the result - the foliage on this little tree is a rather acidic green, but that is one of the few things I can actually change in the free version of the software.

Bearing in mind the time limitations I have placed on myself to finish this map I'm going to use this technique to generate canopy shapes for the hand drawn winter trees, turning them into spring/summer/fall trees. Either that or I will simply use the trees I render from Vue as symbols in their own right

Trees4.JPG