All of the sudden, things start to happen, even when all you try to do is make maps of places that don’t exist. After doing this full time for well over a decade now, I never really thought that I would be more than a very minor player in this industry, known by more than a few Greyhawk gamers and have a few hundred patreons at best using the funds that gave me to keep up mapping Greyhawk.
It seems like I have now done it for long enough to have broken through into the industry enough for it impact my daily life with way more emails, convention requests and other things, that despite being fun takes time away from what I want to do the most mapping Greyhawk. Something I have been tasked to do in an “official” capacity for the Melf’s Guide to Greyhawk project. This has been underway for a bit over a year for me, and it is something I never dared to believe would happen and then it kind of sneaks up on you. This is one for my bucket list for sure!
Commissions are weird and very different from what I do for you guys, for my Patreon work I test carefully first, make plans for a project based on the outcome of the tests and then get to work on creating the maps I had planned to do. When you work on commissions there is a lot of guesswork involved, most publishers have a hard time defining what they really want until they see it. I understand them, most of the others involved come from writing things and are good at judging things when they see it, but they want to see at least a sketch before making a cartography decision. This usually means my work often gets evaluated last in pipeline. Now I’ve been around the post a few times so this time I set out making a decent “placeholder” map of the whole area to have something to show and use in case it would be needed quickly.
This placeholder map is almost done, which is a great relief, hopefully I never have to use it. It is sad to say about something that has taken more than six months of my time, but I know I can do better and that is what I’ve started to ramp up as the placeholder map is being archived in the ready folder. It has taken valuable time away from my regular Patreon work, I’m so sorry for that. But it is not all a loss, I’ve learned things both from research and improved my workflow.
My render computer has logged 382 render hours in March alone rendering a significant part of the Flanaess in porta-potty scale. Each area requires 9 renders for the heightmap alone to make sure the tiles match, and as always, it’s the damn lakes and rivers that are the hassle. Each tile is first rendered terrain without water, and then a version with water. Each tile is then 50% overlapped render is made which then must be manually merged selected with version of lakes and rivers to keep for each little part. It was devilishly hard to figure out how to do this effectively and still get a good result over large areas, but after years of trial and error I now have a proven method that takes time but works. There are still a few bits here and there that need manual fixing in world Machine afterwards but that has become almost routine as well.
I have over 300,000 square miles ready for texture render which I have started to do on my main machine. Each tile only takes about 20 minutes to create a set of 9 textures that then needs to be edited manually in Photoshop. I now have 9TB of these textures sitting for over a dozen tiles which will be a half time job for me the rest of my days. Sounds ominous but I’m actually looking forward to it, tedious but very rewarding and brings out the artist in me. After all this programming and technical stuff, it’s great to lean back and grab my Wacom tablet and get to work on bringing the Flanaess to life. Part of this is trees, roads and buildings which is even more fun. In the beginning it was VERY tedious, but I’ve learned how to do this more effectively to. The placeholder map forced me to figure out how to work in a smarter way.
It took half a decade of test, trials and lots of errors, but now work on the new generation of maps is started. The first stage is still done using the venerable World Machine 3, but I’m still trying to move even that process to WM4 and Gaea, to speed things up and get better tools to work with. WM4 and Gaea 3 are coming very soon to, and hopefully I will get my hands on early versions of both in a few weeks. The feature lists of both include things that have been on my wishlist for many years, huge area mapping up to four times larger areas that I work with now and support for vector displacement which means I can do overhangs, caves and more. Rivers are gaining some neat improvements with meanders and such, which I only believe when I see it, but every improvement is welcome.
The next se of banners is coming soon, I have a dozen made and want to do a few more, and some pennants to go along with them.
It is a great side gig to distract me with a couple of hours a week in between regular mapping. I have a list of more heraldry to do as well, and banners and heraldry will get sone needed attention in May when I hope to hand over some Melf work. If that means my part in the project is done or just beginning, no knowing which is why commissions are difficult. It’s not the work, which is often easier with lower resolution, it is the uncertainty, meaning I must plan for the worst and then hope that I can spend a lot of that time working for you guys instead. The good thing with the Melf Project is that if there is time to do a set of better maps, the work will be dual use both for the Melf project and my Patreon.
Plan B
Speaking of uncertainty, I think all of you have noticed the state of our real world which unfortunately might affect my life more directly in the future. Depending on how things develop I might have to go back to my old job in Sweden. It is not something I think will be needed, but there is a risk it will be and I’m setting up “Project Plan B” if things get bad enough. I’m determined to stay in California and keep on mapping until spring 2027, already planning to attend PAGE and Gary Con next year. If the situation demands me back, I’ll execute Plan B after Gary Con. It takes a while to get back in shape when you are 60 and lots of things to go over in case this needs to happen. I’ve lived here for over a decade and dismantle that life is not easy both materially and mentally. There are a number of elections and other events I will keep a close eye on and make a decision on what to do together with people back in Sweden. In the meantime, I intend to keep mapping and enjoying life here as much as possible until next spring no matter what. Hopefully the state of the world will allow me to keep doing this for a long time to come, and I have made so many friends in this hobby I want to keep in touch with.
Thank you so much for making this possible!!
