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. 

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!