I hope you are all staying safe and get some time to plan and play some Greyhawk games!
My 576 CY Atlas work is progressing with 43 out of the 50 areas mapped, an I hope to have all 50 done next week. Then it's time to do overview maps, political maps, index, covers and a few other extras to make it into a complete atlas.
My Shield Lands Campaign map is in the tedious phase of water system design. This is a very important feature to make a map "realistic", logical, and rich in detail, and often overlooked. It is not only finished maps that are missing detailed water ways, I have so far only used one terrain creation tool that have at least a token support for this and that is ancient Wilbur. All modern tools that have come along afterwards have no, or very little support for draining the terrain properly. There is a lot of talk about this feature in the road map of almost all the terrain tools, but to my dismay it seems to almost always be in the future.
This means that I have to manually program and edit all rivers using World Machine, which takes longer that the rest of the terrain creation combined. The image below is a screenshot of the 30 mile area of the southern Shield Lands that will be the starting area for my next campaign.
The colors are a combination of elevation colors, flat mask rivers and flow lines that I use for this type of work. The tiny little blue streaks are the flow lines and they indicate where tiny rivers and creeks can be. I will manually mask them in Photoshop afterwards along with the rivers. The rivers and lakes that are on the map are the whole river beds, which means that this is the are the tend to fill at maximum flow. Most times a smaller flow is meandering through the river bed.
It is almost ready for rendering, only a few gitech here and there that I need to fix. Then it is time for proper texturing and vegetation. Below is a map showing the area I'm working on, the red square is the area of interest. This will take me about two months to map, but with proper tools and more experience I think I can bring that down to around two weeks.
