Those of you who read my thank you post, noticed that I stated that next fall my goal is to take a year off to do what I like the most mapping my campaign. Yes I want to lay all other mapping aside for a year to get back into the Greyhawk groove again!
Why wait until next fall and what am I going to work on?
The delayed start no later than August comes primarily that I have commissioned work scheduled in parallel to Patreon pretty much until then, and the 20 year mark is October 2018. So those two reasons make fall a good time to start. A third reason is that I want to have some of the new tools up and running by then as well.
What I'm going to work on is pretty much up to you guys! With a full year of full time work means we can do quite a lot. There are several things to consider. Large of small projects, research and technical limitations are the first ones in my mind.
Project ideas I'm thinking of are: Iconic locations, historic, trade, climate ocean currents, new lands are obvious candidates to me. There are also some stuff I'm thinking of that are not really maps but something I always wanted to do, things like scripts and symbols of the Flanaess, more heraldry, architectural styles.
Some are better candidates than others, i'm just listing things that I always wanted to do. An obvious category I didn't mention is city maps, for that one there are some super cool tools that I would love to make use of. They are expensive and requires some learning so might not be withing my budged (both time and money wise) for next year. So a Greyhawk City project I would like to hold off a year or two on 😉
Research will be a vital part of this project so any and all help will be very much appreciated. We need to set up some better way to collaborate next year. Discord, Google Hangouts or something, whatever might work best.
This might be what is needed to bring this Patreon up to full speed and make real progress and bring in more people!
Thank you again for supporting me, I'm really looking forward to next year 🙂
I hope you all had a great Christmas and got a chance to catch up with family and friends. I had a great couple of days with family and also finally took the time to replace my 14 year old car with a new one. It was out of necessity, the old one was falling apart, and as you well know I've had enough of things falling apart lately!
Today I'm back at my (still sit down only) desk again working on the Island Project making good progress. Ground texturing pretty much done and a good part of vegetation as well. Water and beaches still need a work over.
The forest is still only conifers the leafy trees are still to be added into the mix. First a look at the texture:
and then the shading:
These two will be properly rendered and then imported into Photoshop for the final touch up and top down map. There will be special posts and videos about that part when I get there in a week or so. Before then there will be basic and advanced posts and videos explaining texturing and forests in World Machine, expect them in a day or two.
Thank you all for joining my Patreon, its been a goal of mine for years to do this and now its finally coming true. Only one small project done so far, but its only been a couple of months, and the there are more to come, much more. This time of year despite all the hectic preparations for festivities and family gatherings, it is still important for me to try and sum up my efforts and to set up my future goals.
This year has been mainly about Midgard, a huge undertaking that have keep me busy for over a year. Midgard have been the second biggest project of my career weighing in just after my Flanaess map. If you include the Southlands it is in many respects my biggest project to date that have spanned over the last three years. This year I've also managed to do about a dozen other small projects for novels, the computer screen, a number of adventures and a map of a real world resort!
Next year its time to leave Midgard, at least for a time, and come back to old familiar turfs. There is a special reason for this, my career as a fantasy cartographer started. It began very humbly when in 1996 I lay my hands on Bryce 3D and decided to try and learn to use it and create a map for my Greyhawk campaign. I struggled for a few years and started to get result I liked, something called the Internet came along and I decided to share my work some years later and the rest you know!
Below is what my first mapped bits that are still part of the final Flanaess map looks like. It is a piece of the Wild Coast that I cherish not for the quality but for the memories of all the struggle it took to create it. It dates from October 1998.
After twenty years it is time to return to my roots and recharge my creativity byt doing what I love the most, mapping my campaign. Starting next fall my goal is to dedicate a whole year to Greyhawk mapping, and Patreon will be the place where things will be around with previews and decisions of what should be done!
Technically 2018 will probably be a year of big change, maybe not in the end result but in how to get there. New tools that are harnessing the capabilities of modern computer graphics are finally starting to arrive, and instead of gazing at small fuzzy preview ports that takes forever to update you can see things in almost full glory instantly. This will cut most of the wait and most of the guess work out of the equation, and I will not miss the minutes of waiting every time I make a change, just too see that the results are not what I intended.
The now old World Machine will get some needed competition in the race for best high quality terrain generation software. There are a number of contenders including World Machine itself, but I doubt that Stephen Schmitt will be able to ramp up his development to keep up with the others. Two new hot contenders are Gaea and Instant Terra, both make extensive use of GPU power and have a modern flexible UI. Terragen and Vue are still in the race for the best tool for CG terrain as well. A dark horse in this race are the game engine tools like World Creator for Unity.
I work with large worlds which means I have special needs that are not what most users who create for computer games or illustrations have. This is one of the main reasons I like World Machine so much and have stuck with it despite a lackluster development progress. Both Instant Terra and Gaea seem to be able to match or surpass World Machine in this critical aspect and they also have the fractal and advanced erosive pluming needed to create great looking landscapes. Gaea promises to take things further in a a way that I have always dreamt of, an artistic driven approach. Applied on top of the fractal mess and technical pluming that are needed, but throws me off target way too often, it can do wonders for my creative focus.
The other side of my work is the gaming side of things, to make the result more useful and inspiring. This is something that will be my main focus moving forward. In order to try and accomplish this I pledge to game more and regularly, as a player in others games but also to run my own games. My Greyhawk gaming have been on a three year hiatus and to start again as a part of mapping the world of Greyhawk again will go hand in hand. The first project will be Lendore Isle early next year.
The other goal for next year it to learn new tools, and advance my skills in a few of the ones I'm already using. When it comes to old tools Vue is highest on my list, its been in my inventory for eight years and still my skills are only basic. By the end of next year I want to bring my Vue mojo up to a professional level. The latest version of Vue also have better terrain generating capabilities which makes it even more interesting, and the rendering features are second to none. This has been my main reason to use Vue so far, but I want to expand the use as a foundation for future endeavors into more close up mapping. Things like locations, cities and battle maps are tasks that Vue can be a superb tool for.
Realm Works and Hero Lab deserves a special mention here since I have been using them a lot for several years as a player and in the background. Next year I will bring forth that work in the public light as a part of both my own games and how to use my maps.
New tools topping my list to learn are Gaea and Other World Mapper. Tools I will start to look into next year are Geographical Information Systems (GIS) both Open Source and commercial tools. My time and capacity to learn will probably be met and exceeded with this, but just in case there are more inspiration the game engine Unity have been in my sights for several years.
I love to keep myself busy, creating and pushing new boundaries. I need your help in this. both to make it possible to set other things aside and to keep me focused and inspired. Thank you again for all your help and support, I could not do this without you!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years, together we can visit the most amazing places.
Anna
This is not as bad as it seems, but I had a desk malfunction and it will take a few days to get things up and running again. My adjustable desk stopped working and I was a bit too eager to fix it and it came crashing down.
I live in a very earthquake prone area so thankfully I had bolted my monitors firmly onto the desk, and they made it!
New parts are on their way, and in the mean time I'll use the desk in lower mode. But it will still take a few days to get things set up again.
Thank you for your patients and support!
When you work on complicated projects in software like World Machine, you often face problems that seems hopeless at first, but widen your view a bit and think logically and possibilities opens up.
Here is an example of how I solved (or at least improved) the creation of wetlands on flat areas surrounding lakes and rivers.
Here is a link to the latest version of the WM file. A warning - this file is my development file, so it contains some "spaghetti" that might behave as a form of cartographic web spell. So tread carefully! 🙂
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ter3mq29zrzkse1/Islands%20Low-76.tmd?dl=0
Here are the Islands and its waterways. The area is 100km (60 miles) and consist one major island, five minor islands and a number of tiny islands. The yellow along the coast are my enhanced coloring to better see the beaches gearing up for texturing.
Natural variation is important both the look of the terrain and its believably, but also to make the area interesting as a setting for your adventures. Here is a perspective that shows a little of the variation.
Coastlines goes from extensive beaches to sharp cliffs, river deltas and archipelagos of small reefs. Terrains goes from plains to craggy highlands reaching up to over a 1000ft. Lakes, marshlands and rivers dots the landscape of these seasonal islands.
Next is to set up forestation, which will be the my focus for the next couple of days. Then it is time for texturing, which will make this bland looking thing start to come to life!
Here is the file I used in the latest video. It is a "cleaned-up" version of the file I'm using. I have removed some of the more experimental bits to lessen the confusion a bit, I know by experience that looking at a WM file you haven't created yourself is daunting. Even opening a WM-file you created yourself is daunting, if you haven't worked on it for a little while.
You can grab the file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ydb5p5b5xuu0uq1/Presentation%20-%20Elevation%20and%20Rivers.tmd?dl=0
You will need a veresion of GeoGlyph to use this file, and you can use the Community version of GeoGlyph (that is free): http://quadspinner.com/GeoGlyph#editions
Special thanks to Quadspinner for the ReFlow macro that is part of the GeoGlyph 2 addon for world Machine. You can find out more here: http://quadspinner.com.
Just to be open about it, Quadspinner is a backer of this Patreon. But this is not a sponsored link. I payed full price for GeoGlyph, and use it on a daily basis to improve my work.
Good luck with your Islands!
Here comes a video where I try to explain how the setup works. To be able to create large varied terrains the management of data are key.
It took me several years to figure out how to do this properly, but now I'm starting to have a proper understanding of this and hopefully even able to give that knowledge to you as well.
I'm sorry for the background noise, forgot to silence my Discord client, and my dog Minnie was keen on my attention as well.
The waterways of our Islands are being created and I'm very pleased with the results.
I'm using a combination of Lakes, artistic rivers created using a Layout Generator and small waterways created by algorithm. This way I'm able to combine my desire to place things where I want them and have tons of details filled in automatically.
There are still a few minor tweaks still needed, but it works and we are on schedule to have this done by the end of the week.
The river algorithms can be set per Biome, so for this seasonal project they will be numerous and plentiful, but for dryer Biomes much less of them. They can also be presented but textured differently, to create dried out riverbeds for example.
A big part of getting this right is to be able to structure the process right. What do I need to create. How to best do it, auto-generate or artistic. In what order, what are needed in order to create a certain type of data.
This job is one bit programming and data management and one part artistic. Sometimes you paint using Photoshop brushes, sometimes it is by molding algorithms, and in the end is how well you manage it all.
I just created a video describing this in detail that will be posted here for Trailblazer and Cartographer backers.
Patreon also cancelled their announced fee changes, keeping things the way they are. This is a wise move in my opinion, and hopefully Patron will follow their own advice and change things only after listening to their users both backers and creators.
