After an almost two week visit to Midgard I'm now back on the Island Project again. Major terrain building is done, what is left are a few small islands here and there to complete this area and make it more interesting.

Work on rivers and lakes are underway as well. Tried out a few different way of going about creating the water systems. In World Machine, and every other tool I have tested so far, rivers and wetlands are a major weak spot. A new generation tools and upgrades to World Machine will hopefully include proper ways of creating rivers, but for now it is a bit of a hack.

My results are what I would call acceptable, and with texturing and some post render touch up in Photoshop the results might even be good. I'll post some videos explaining the technical side of this for the Cartographer Backers soon.

Terrain with lakes and rivers I hope to have ready by the end of next week. Then it is time for vegetation which will take another week or so. Settlements and roads might be time to tackle around Christmas, and with some luck this project might be done early January. That is the plan. 

For the past 14 months I've been working on Midgard, and yesterday I handed over the last updates. The final rush to get everything wrapped up in time for the printers meant that I had to let everything else pause for a few days.

I will catch up with the Island Project, messages and updates in a day or two. December will be a month devoted fully to my Patreon, finish the Island Project, kick off Lendore Isle and hopefully manage to sneak in a few extras as well. 

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and again thank you for your support!
Spent five days in Philly working at PAX Unplugged and got back to the nice weather in Southern California again for Thanksgiving. Back at my desk my time has been divided between Patreon and Midgard.

Most of the island terrain is done, want to add a few minor islands for more detail. A rocky inaccessible island and some sort of archipelago. Added a couple of lakes and river systems, and now I'm working on how to best create realistic small creeks and waterways.

Future tools will hopefully have a reliable function to generate this without too much work. Until that happens a more hands on approach is needed. The way I'm doing it is to use a mask derived from the erosion flow data. Thanks to the excellent ReFlow macro included in the GeoGlyph 2 package it is easy to generate the data and mask it further, but for the ultimate accuracy I used Photoshop to had paint a mask that I can import back into World Machine again.

The blue overlay you see in the image above is the erosion flow data, and my rivers are in red on top of that. This will probably take me a several days of Photoshopping for all of the islands. I'm starting to a test using only the small northern island, and if it works I can do the rest as well. The principal is simple so I see now reason for it to not work, other than it is too much work for me.  

For those of you that thought that this was easy, and a good quality result was simple to achieve, you need to think again. There are short cuts but most of the time you still need to put in a lot of work to get that really special result.

Upcoming posts will be, an overview video on texturing in World Machine. For the Cartographer Backers we will delve into terrain detailing, rivers and lakes, videos and source files will be posed shortly.

The Island project will not be done before Christmas, so there will be no charge in November. Aiming for an Island Project wrap up around the end of the year. Next year will start with a Creative Commons Project - Lendore Isle.

This will give us time to discuss and determine what this Patreon should go after that. Both what type of terrain or landscape to tackle next, and also what Creative Common Project to accompany it.

Next year will also be a year with new tools becoming available. This can open up new possibilities and speed things up, but initially they can be a hurdle taking time to get into all the new. But it is a necessary frustration leading to new heights! 

When I started using World Machine to create my maps I tried to find tutorials to get me started. I found some great information to get me going,  but one  thing I missed was a tutorial on how the Layout Generator works. So I decided to try and remedy that for you.

Spent the weekend working at PAX Unplugged in Philly, so my voice is WAY worse that usual, sorry for that. 

Here is a video detailing the setup and creation of the base terrain of for the island project.

you can download the file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1zluryk4oeu5x0e/Presentation%20-%20Basic%20Elevation.tmd?dl=0

Please play with it and create islands, good luck!

Work on the second project, Islands are under way and making good progress!

This will be my first ever "fully featured" project, meaning it will be properly mapped in 3D with rivers, forests, roads and settlements. All my previous maps have had to include shortcuts or cheats using Photoshop or Illustrator to make things afterwards due to technical or time constraints. 

All the programming for the features are in place, what remains now is to model the terrain, texturing and a final tweaking of settings before rendering.

More videos and in depth posts will come next week. This weekend I will be in Philadelphia for PAX Unplugged. If you are at the con you can find me in the Lonewolf Development booth.

Thank you again for your support!

Here is a short video introducing the very basics of 3D terrain creation and World Machine. 

Here is a first sneak peak at what it looks like at the moment. This is after a day of texturing. Still a bit rough and not anywhere enough variation, and no foresting yet, but I'm very pleased with it so far. 

I've done a first video presenting (or at least trying to) show the Island Project. Please forgive the totally unscripted presentation, just made it to see if it worked and it did so I'm uploading it,