Now that my Patreon have been around for a few months and two projects have seen the light of day I have started to reflect on what has worked and things that needs improvement.
The first is that projects need to be reasonable in scope, the target should be something that can be done in a month. The Crater Project fulfilled this really well, but the Island Project was a disaster in this aspect.
Going forward projects that are small scale, 100ft/pixel or less, should be limited to 8K if fully featured. For maps that are not full 3D or without things like buildings and roads it can be 16K. Projects like the Islands will cover 10-30 miles instead of 60.
Large scale maps, more than 100ft/pixel should be limited to 16K. This is means that maps of whole realms of Greyhawk (or other settings) will be 200-500 miles per side.
This is with current technology, and as you all well know technology are in constant change, with better hardware and software coming out. Much improved computers are probably two years away for me, so I can't rely on that part to make things go faster of get bigger.
On the software side of things the near future looks more promising. Three things makes me hopeful, Gaea from Quadspinner, World Machine updates and new versions of Vue.
Gaea is a new fully featured terrain creation tool that is currently in early access. The reason I list it first is that it show some major progress with GPU usage and novel features that I know will speed up things and improve the results. There still a lot of features yet not fully functional, but what is ready is fantastic!
World Machine development shows real signs of coming back from its zombie state which is great news. Vue is also making advances with better features.
I will probably use all three in combination going forward, and add tools like 3DStudio Max and Unity within a year or two. Now back to the more immediate future!
The next project will bring us back to Greyhawk mapping the Lendore Isle. This is the first stage of my Flanaess 2.0 Project, to bring my Flanaess map into the new century.
The goals are:
- Create a elevation model with a resolution of 100 ft - 300ft per pixel.
- Update the textures to match the 3D landscape and increased
resolution.
- Masks and Splat Map data for things like biomes, vegetation, rock,
Seasonal Textures and more.
- Elevation model for ocean (and lake) depth at around 500 ft - 1000 ft
per pixel.
My current Flanaess map are in need of a revision as well. I have collected a number of things to add or change during the last year, so one project will be to include them and create a 2018 revision of the map.
Darlene have some undertakings that will become a project (or several projects) this year as well.
I'm also contemplating a change of the rewards, but I will post my ideas for this in a separate post to keep the discussions of rewards separate from future projects.
Thank you again for supporting me!
What was supposed to have take a month took more than twice as long and there are still a few things left to do. The reasons are many and all my fault, from underestimating the complexity of this undertaking to my stubbornness to see it through to completion.
This project was to "fully" visualize a set of islands 60 x 60 miles at the resolution of 10ft per pixel. This meant all the images created would be 32K, which is 32,768 x 32,768 pixels. My most detailed project to date, detailed enough to include roads and individual buildings. I' had done some tests with World Machine with this scale so I new it would work.
It did work, kinda of, what I had failed to test was to render an area the size of this project at this resolution. To render the entire islands took over four days. When you are using tiles its wisest to render all tiles in one go to get a perfect match. Textures can be easily patched up afterwards, but heightmaps are a bit more difficult. For still image renderings you can always paint over the ugly bits afterwards, but with video this gets even more difficult. With this project I wanted to see if I could make everything work. I'm proud to say I did get the results I was aiming for but at a price of glacial progress.
The next major undertaking was Photoshop editing, images 32,768 pixels are a bit too to much to handle effectively at 16bit color depth every time you have to save, and save often! Even using a SSD drive it took 10 minutes or so to save when the file size reached around 90GB. Then there is the simple truth that a 32K project is FOUR times larger than a 16K project, I will never ever forget that after spending almost a month in Photoshop!
The last bit was to get it all setup in Vue for the scenic 3D views. This was the first time I used more advanced features like custom maps to drive Displacement, Bump and Reflections. The results are downright fantastic with vegetation and rocks that looks photo-real from a distance.
One major part of this project are still not finished, "How To" content. It is not easy to do especially not when most of the things you want to convey are "How not to do"! But now that I have managed to get it done it will be easier to focus on what worked and tell you how to do it. I still have a hard time talking to myself in front of my computer, but I will keep trying.
I have some ideas on changing my Patreon as well, more on that in a separate post soon.
Here is the link the the Advanced Content Folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1w8et9kwnktqhtp/AABI5JPJg6nqu94NNbD4ePAea?dl=0
Here is the link the the Basic Content Folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lzm075e2wylvswe/AACRwdgxJuGdCZptbmSARLXZa?dl=0
After a way too long time my second Patreon project is ready!
The files will be ready today and links will be posted separately for respective backers.
Thank you all for your patients with this project. It has taken for too long to get done, and I will write a separate post about why and how to improve things in the future.
Now I'm going to try and answer my birthday wishes 🙂
Isometric map creation are under way, and here are a first result straight from VUE. It will be a couple of more days of rendering left, and then a final round in Photoshop.
I'm leaving for Gary Con in a few hours and will be back home Sunday night again to finish this project.
Here is a sneak peak at whats coming, and I must say I'm proud of these!
In this folder I will place all the Advanced Content for this project. First out is the Layered PSD Top down Maps.
You can access it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1w8et9kwnktqhtp/AABI5JPJg6nqu94NNbD4ePAea?dl=0
I have Created a folder with all the Basic content for this project. This content will be available to all my Patreons.
You can access it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lzm075e2wylvswe/AACRwdgxJuGdCZptbmSARLXZa?dl=0
Here comes a video that explains how the Layered PSD files works and a bit of what you can do with them.
To make full use of them you need Photoshop. I tested the files in GIMP but the usability is limited. GIMP doesn't support adjustment layers so the shading will look dark or washed out depending on how you brighten it.
I will look into trying to see if there is a way around that limitation in GIMP. It would be neat since not everyone can afford to use Photoshop. Will also test it in Photoshop Elements to see if the more affordable version can handle it.
