Project Islands - short update!

2018-02-28
,

Working on the Top Down Maps, and the rest will be ready later today!
The top down maps along with the heightmaps form the data needed for the 3D maps like the isometric and special renders.

What I was hoping would take a month will take around two months to finish, so this have been a learning experience that will shape things going forward. Doubling the size of the project from 30 miles (50 km) to 60 miles (100 km)at the same scale means the area (and therefore the work involved) four times. 

In addition to taking four times the effort to edit, with this much more data barriers in hardware and software becomes much more apparent. For example to render things in World Machine went from ten hours to over four days. 

The Islands Project is 32K resolution which means that each type of data (elevation, texture masks etc) is an image 32,768 pixels across. until I have better hardware and updated tools, future projects will be limited to 16K resolution. Applied to the Lendore Isle this means 100 ft/pixel resolution, so there are hopes for the "Flanaess Map 2.0" update!

Resolution isn't everything, there are also features included and how well it scales both up and down. When you from 10 ft to 100 ft per pixel things like buildings and roads are no longer visible and need to be represented by symbols instead, either individually for roads or aggregated into settlements for buildings.

But now my thoughts are wandering off into the future, back to Photoshop again!