Back home from a hectic and great time at Gary Con, seeing friends and lots of fellow gamers is always a treat. An unusual nasty case of some sort of Con Crud kept me occupied for a while but now I’m up and running again, both literary and with my mapping.

After several years trying to figure out the best way to map Greyhawk at a high resolution in full 3D I did a series of Shield Lands maps for my campaign with the resolution of 5ft per pixel. They look great and work fantastic for everything from large overview to battle maps, the problem was that the workflow relied on using tiling to cover large areas. With a few tweaks I managed to overcome the flaws it introduced. Then came the dreaded problems of memory issues and crashes reimporting the tiles, and I had to rethink how to do things. After two years of trying all sorts of ways around the problem I’m now fairly certain of how to best proceed forward.

To avoid tiling and rendering limits I have switched to using a resolution of 100 feet per pixel, and a 16K render area, covering a bit over 150 x 150 miles. This gives me enough detail to work with for local more detailed maps, avoid using tiles. This also gives me enough room to create those large area elevation changes that are devilishly difficult to capture well using small areas. It also gives me a decent control of drainage (lakes and rivers) on a continental scale.

I’m relying on my trusted tool World Machine 3, which despite its age still reigns supreme among terrain creation tools. It has real world measurements, the best previews, and the most stable. I will use WM4 for texturing and corrections and be ready to move even the terrain creation to WM4 when (or if) it becomes good enough.

I will work on this tonight on my Twitch livestream at 6pm PDT at: https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer

I’ll make a long post about this soon, explaining both the workflow and my terrain choice.

My sources project has just reached a first milestone, all the country names are entered with references, 119 of them. Next up are provinces and local names concluding the political labels, which I hope to have done in a week or so. Two big groups of labels left, geographic ones (oceans, lakes, river, highlands and more), and all the settlements. This will take some time, but my goal is to have it all done by summer.

You can find it here: https://annabmeyer.notion.site/19e0da32cbe6806a922ee8a3e80dd169?v=19e0da32cbe6803b824c000cc8429cc1

When all the labels from my public map are entered it is time to overhaul my website, notion site and online presence in general. It is a bit of a mess now, especially the way my content is organized. Things need to be a lot easier to find and download. I have ideas and plans which will be tested leading up to the overhaul this summer.

I will be playing in an ACLU fundraiser game with the awesome Guild Superior members, tomorrow 6-9pm CDT. Donation link: https://tilt.fyi/C67PUhClUe

Please join us and support a VERY urgent cause and have fun doing it!