August/September 2017 Challenge: Dwarf City

[Falconius]

The ones I think I've chosen are:
-Map a Mountain Location
-Submerged
and
Verticality

With maybe a little Gold and Trading thrown in.

### Latest WIP ###


So this is the area I've cobbled together And where I'm planning to put the city. I wanted to kind of get terrain that could exist in reality, rather than something too unbelievable, so I got the area from good old Earth. It's been modified obviously, Wilbur, as ever, came in handy. I wanted to get a general sense of the area so I did this larger map to figure out and locate things, but basically the map will deal with the areas in red notations.

I couldn't decide which terrain between these two I like more (one of them is unpainted but I'm talking about the land shape rather than the overall look. One is softer and drape-ier, and the one with the height map painted on it is Wilbur cut and polished. I'll probably go with the second, but wanted to hear what other people had to say.


You wouldn't believe how long I spent trying to figure out how to paint that height map on to the top one before realizing I don't have to paint any of it since this isn't the map I'll be working with, but rather only the foundation.

[Mouse]

Very impressive already

How did you create the 3D relief?

[Falconius]

I import "image to mesh" in 3D Coat using the hight map for the image and also the bump under the image. I got the hight map by using Terrain Party and then bringing them into Krita and cutting and pasting them together, then sort of fixing them then exporting them as a png and then running Wilbur over it, then bringing it to 3d Coat, then trying some experiments and a bit of editing, then exporting depth along -y (which gave unsatisfactory results really, something I'm not understanding), then back to Wilbur for some touch ups and then back to 3D Coat. Of course now that I've got a better idea of what I'm doing I can streamline those steps a bit. And finally, I'm going to take it to Blender for putting buildings on and such.

I just realized though that I'm short on those mountains in the render by about a factor of 4, these are the Rocky Mountains after all, that main peak there should hit 1400 meters above sea level and that water is just above sea level. In other words that mountain goes up nearly kilometer and a half in a distance of about 2 kilometers. So I'm redoing it and they look way more impressive.

[Mouse]

LOL! Well if nothing else - that will teach me to ask silly questions!

I've not been able to get 3D Coat to work on my machine. I think a bog-standard laptop isn't really the ideal platform for that kind of thing. I'm having to stick to Vue to produce the landscapes in my portal bubbles. Even so, its dreadfully slow

[Redrobes]

Oh, particularly interested in following this one. I am not sure if I will have time to do one but id like to have a go this month or two and the set of criteria you have chosen is similar to what I wanted only I think my map would be pretty large scale - maybe a handful of houses. I have in mind an italian villa... anyway, its interesting to see how you get your height map. USGS do a lot of height maps of the earth as do NASA and a load of other places. Its nice that the USA have a free use policy on government data. I havent ported my dragon flight app to linux yet. I should do that soon really. Its a simple real time 3D viewer. For Mouse if your on windows I could shoot you a copy to try. It used to be a free download but I need to find a home online for it. I also did a tut for creating height maps from arbitrary maps and it only used an image editor but the results wont be as good as Vue or something scanned like USGS height map info.

Also, its a little early in the process for me to say which one of the two maps you posted I think look the best. Either could be depending on where its going from here. But do post some notes about how your going about it as I am curious. I had never heard of Terrain Party or 3D Coat.

[Falconius]

### Latest WIP ###

Fixed the hight issues I think. Actually I tamped it down a bit, I don't think there was enough shades in the grey scale to accurately depict the land forms. So they ended up too extreme if I used what I think the right ratio is. I put in all the lakes and edited it a bit.

[Mouse]

That's seriously impressive

Does it render in ISO perspective?

(I'm still trying to work out an alternative to the way I'm doing mine - even though 3D Coat really doesn't work on my laptop)

[Falconius]

Yeah you can do ISO as well, the first one in the thread is ISO which is why it looks flat I think. Blender has an ISO camera as well, and you can model things in there, so long as you keep the polygon count low it should work fine I'd think. And it's easier to keep the poly count low when modeling by editing the mesh than it is sculpting (which is what you do in 3D Coat). For instance that mountain object has a polygon count of around 9 million, that is a heavy burden for a computer, and when sculpting it's really easy to end up in the double digit millions. I honestly don't understand in the slightest how a computer can keep track of all that information.

[Ilanthar]

Man, you're getting some very impressive 3D skills! I'm very curious to see the next steps.

[Falconius]

Thanks. That reminds me, you want to see something really amazing? Check this out. A saw this a couple of day before I started the thread and its the thing really driving me to make this. It's also what has me leaning to just doing it all in 3d instead of doing in in top down layers which is what I originally intended. I'm still not sure where to go forward from here, but I think I should do an over all map using this as a base showing where the ports are, where the aqueducts are and other infrastructure, and use that as an inset for the main city map. But if I do that using 3d models does it mean I have to sort of stick to that style through the main city map?