After a long series of technical and behind the scenes post in this series it’s now time to start turning all that work into the first stage of the final map, giving the terrain proper realistic texturing. Nature is both endlessly varied and yet still abide by rules and predictable patterns, and to replicate that using fractals and clever programming is not easy. The SPLAT map is the first stage of that defining what time of Biome each area is a part of the next step is to define each Biome and then blend the Biomes according to the SPLAT map data.  We must turn the SPLAT map below:

Into this:

Done right a fantasy landscape can look totally believable, yet specially created to suit the stories that are meant to be played out in it. The trick is to define each Biome properly, and have the Biomes appear where they realistically would do so. The example above only has a few Biomes, to types of grass, one short and barren and one longer and richer, bogs, lakes, rivers, reeds, sand, rocks and gravel.  I've used the selection tools that was the focus of the last post in this series to create the SLPAT map, then edited the Splat map in Photoshop to improve on the things that my fractal programming didn't do a good job with. Artistic input in the form of painting using a stylus is also a great way to work in some of the special details from written sources or needed for the stories. This approach also makes it easy to adjust things, make a test render using half resolution and go bac to Photoshop and edit the Splat map fix issues and then render again.

Let’s look at a couple of the Biomes, starting with the grasses that are the light and slightly darker green on the SPAT map.  Most of Shield Lands are covered, in my view in either a more barren type of open sparsely overgrown open plains, with short hardier grass and occasional low bushes and other hardy forms of sage. Higher up the grasses are gradually replaced by mosses and hardier forms of ground hugging plants. The darker green are more fertile lands, plenty of grasses, herbs and blooming flowers forming rich meadows, bushes and trees are still rare due to both lack of consistent and ample rainfall, gracing by wild and domestic animals. This is not really the case anymore, the war has decimated and scared off both domestic and wild animals, but the standoff and population decline have made wild animals move back in again to some degree. If the hostilities continue the area might see more bushes and trees, or more fires and devastation that depends on the outcome of your campaign!

Here it is important to state that it is exceedingly difficult to model temperate wild plains, that is a habitat that is almost complete gone on Earth today, replaced by industrial agriculture that have turned the landscape into a gigantic production facility. This requires studying the few little remnants left, creativity and some guess work to come up with something that is useful from a gaming perspective, and inspirational.

Landscapes have a history, and that needs to be considered to make them believable. Shield Lands the way I see it has a surprising amount of landscape variety and history, I've assumed that this landscape is a mix of mostly old and work down terrain made up of a mixture of sedimentary and harder rock covered by a fair bit of soil in most places. Here and there are the scars of old vulcanism in the form of rugged basalt features, which will get more and more common the closer we get to the majestic White Plume Mountain.  I also assumed that it used to be wetter in recent geological history and used to have way more lakes and bigger rivers. The lakes are now mostly turned into bogs, with small lakes in the center of some of them and a lot of them partly or fully overgrown. This makes the landscape dotted with valleys with a very flat bottom and totally flat areas dotted around in the otherwise covered in rounded low hills. The Southern Coast feature a set of moderate hills, that I have named the Serion Hills in my campaign, with rounded granite peaks rising into about 3000 feet in a few places. Not much to speak of compared to the majestic mountains elsewhere in the Flanaess but still high enough to be different than the surrounding lowlands.

Above is an example that even the most boring parts of a game setting has interesting features and stories to tell, even if it is only a green hex on the earlier setting maps. I have found two “islands” surrounded by bogs which seems great places for a keep or a small settlement in easy to defend places.

It needs to be stated that all the screenshots in this post are raw renders and should be seen as work in progress and not finished maps, one more refinement of the SLPAT is needed, vegetation added and a final post render polish in Photoshop. That said I’m proud of the results at this stage.

Below is the World Machine setup for the Short Grass Biome.

It uses two Colorizer Device that uses the colors from images of grasslands with variation driven by distorted fractals. Mixing them using elevation, flow, slope and convexity, and then tweaking the colors according to elevation.

The Long Grass is similar setup but with different fractals color tweaks and elevation parameters.

Bogs are simpler, a colorizer taking its values from bog images, a fractal to drive variation, and a color selection to insert grass texture on the green areas.

And here is what the result can look like with the help of a bit of manual splat map editing.

With only an edit or two of the splat map for each area you can re-use the same World Machine texturing file for a whole region that share the same characteristics. Then make gradual tweaks as you move into new areas.

Almost every aspect of terrain creation is involves masks, the feature that either hides or reveals things. Mask are a familiar feature to all Photoshop users as that greyscale add-on to layers, and in it comes in many variants in World Machine, GAEA, Blender, Vue and every other 3D tool I know of.  It is a simple greyscale bitmap that uses its brightness value to reveal things and lack of it to hide whatever it is associated with.  This is a very powerful feature that can be used in a surprising number of ways.

Bit depth are the key feature of masks, they normally come in 1-bit (black and white), 8-bit, 16-bit and the whopper 32-bit. In most programs like Photoshop for example, you get the bit depth defined in the settings for the file you are working on, but in terrain generating tools you might be required to assign a bit depth to masks either at creation or export. Size difference is the main reason to go low, or the fact that you don't need nuances, at times a clear cut boundary is what you need so even a low value works. Some uses of masks requires very high precision so even a 16-bit mask might not be enough, this is especially true when it comes to heightmaps. 8-bit heightmaps comes with a "Minecraft warning", the low precision creates unnatural terracing across the landscape. 16-bit heightmaps are good enough for most use cases, but if you want to be able to zoom in and create detail maps in the future, or cover large differences in terrain elevation 32-bits are a good precaution. For my Greyhawk project both the ability to create more detailed local maps and cover big elevation differences are vital so a 32-bit height map is needed.

More is not always better, and Photoshop can balk at 32-bit mode due to the sheer size of files and when it comes to color edits the human eye have a hard time seeing the difference between even 8-bit and 16-bit color. Few computer monitors offer more than 10-bit color depth anyway so for texture editing 8-bit masks usually do the job well enough. Inside 3D applications and for terrain creation things are another matter, and selection tools in these mask use the internal bit depth of the application which is usually 32-bit so no need to change things. Exporting masks and heightmaps (which is technically just another mask) is when you have to decide on bit depth.

World Machine and GAEA comes with a large number of Selection Tools, they are the standard way you create masks. You can Select for Elevation, Direction, Roughness, Convexity, Slope, Wetness, Color, Hue, Brightness, Saturation. The last ones are color related and are a nifty way to place trees or tufts of grass in wetlands for example.

Most Selection tools comes with a Falloff  setting that lets you tweak the edge of a selection, sharp and abrupt or smooth  and diffuse.  Enough falloff is critical to have with you, especially when you export for use in Photoshop editing later. You can always sharpen a mask afterwards in Photoshop, but blurring sharp edges usually work less well, and re-renders take lots of times, and can also give you different outcomes, making results not matching.

Selections often need to be done in combinations like slope of a certain degree above a certain elevation, and the result of that selection can be refined by erosion masks to only show within the erosion flow areas. This is how I defined areas of boulders accumulating beneath certain slopes, areas they would have naturally have done so in the real world. The number of possible combinations are literary endless, an Erosion Device creates 4 new masks as part of the process and with secondary selections like Roughness and Convexity you can create all the mask data needed for a truly natural looking terrain with an endless amount of incredible detail.

Masks are also a key part of every step of the process from the mixing of fractals and erosion impact, in biome allocation, texturing relies heavily on the use of masks as do the touch up editing afterwards. Getting used to and mastering the "grey side" of digital imaging is a vital part of digital terrain creation which makes us Greyhawk fans well prepared!

Next part of this series will be a deep dive back into the world of color with texturing.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've had back problems that kept me away from my desk for a bit but now I'm back again at almost full capacity.

Working hard on prepping for my Gary Con Seminar this Friday @6:00pm CDT on  LordGosumba - Twitch channel.

Here is are the topics I plan to cover:

2021 A new generation maps meet the old:

The old map will gradually be replaced

The Atlas, the Easy to Use Version

Flanaess 2021 Updates

Map Responsibly

Limits of Fantasy Cartography

Canvas for Our Stories

Foundations For TTRPG's - Maps - Stories - Rules

Visualizing the World of Greyhawk

Data Driven, Editable, Multi Use

An Example - Hunold Island

Terrain Creation - Lakes & Rivers - Splat Map - Texturing - Vegetation - Touch up

My Campaign

World Simulation - Dynamic - Local - Detailed - Gritty - Uncertain

Oerth - the Home of our Setting

What is out there?

I hope to see you in Twitch Friday, and tomorrow Wednesday for the Legends & Lore Show at 8pm EDT at the  https://www.twitch.tv/lordgosumba Twitch channel.

A while ago I posted a first look at the refreshed Settlement Symbols, here comes a follow-up with the other icons. No additions that I felt the need to include, instead my efforts have been to try and improve the ones I think needs an overhaul or replacement. The goal is to make them easier to identify, especially at low resolution, while maintaining a stylistic consistency. I’m also hoping I have kept some of the connection back to the classic Greyhawk maps of old, expanding and refining rather than totally replacing.

First out are the Bridge, Ford and Ferry symbols. Got rid of the yellow circle in the back and just filled in the shape with yellow, reserving the circle for towns. This is something I have done consistently for the non-town symbols. The old ferry map has gotten a new boat that is a bit more streamlined and simplified. The Ford symbol is something I have been using on my campaign map for a while, and I thought it is time for it to get a revision and become an official symbol.

They are on the small side compared to the larger settlement symbols, the size differences need to be tweaked and tested when they go on an actual map. MY maps will come in a wide range of scales in the future, which requires different symbol sets depending on scale. On larger scale maps bigger settlements will be large enough to have their outlines shown rather than being represented by a symbol, more on that in a future post.

Next up are the Mine symbol, and it too have had its yellow circle replaced with an outline to make it more distinguished. We will see how well this work out in real tests.

I created an oasis symbol in the shape of a simple palm for the Midgard maps and like it a lot better than the old double palms, so I hope a yellow outlined version can settle well in Greyhawk.

The Site symbols are something that I seem to be the inventor of, have not seen a generic site symbol on other fantasy maps. I felt the need for a symbol for all sorts of places that had some sort of significance but where no one lived, from magical to religious places. The old symbols where a bit haphazard and cluttered, the new have kept the Neolithic style but much simpler.

The last one to be renewed are the Dungeon or cave symbol. A staple of fantasy that I now feel belong to the others in a much better way.

If you can come up with other symbols you want to see, have I missed any obvious ones?

I will put together some test with these and we can see if they work or need to b tweaked further. When we have these done, I will work on the demi-human and humanoid versions.

Back to the techie side of mapping again for a first look at texturing, the art, and craft of coloring computer generated objects, in this case terrain. As always when it comes to CG terrain creation nothing is straight forward, so texturing will be done in stages. Texturing is in many ways the best part of my work; you get to see that the awkward looking mess you have been working on for a long time suddenly start coming to life. It is extremely rewarding, and I often get lost in details and dream of who and what lives there and the events taking place. Making sure that stories set in the area I am working on have a suitable location, is a part of my checklist all the way from early terrain generation phase to the end of texturing.

The primary purpose of texturing is to make the terrain look realistic, inspiring and give detailed information of what a certain area consists of, rock, sand, march grass or forested for example. For a map that is going to be used in a single way in a specific medium like printed on a poster, then you create a texture with the right resolution sharp enough to retain all the details in the final print. Printing needs can vary from small cards to wallpaper for a living room wall, all with different needs for resolution and detail.

RPG needs in the future will span a much wider need than prints, VTT’s, PDF’s, Geographical Information Systems and Game Engines are the ones I am aware of now, but more will come I am sure.  When you do a project of this magnitude a key part is to make the most to assure usability as possible and make the results customizable, prolonging their life. For example, forests can grow in places and be cut down in others, seasons come and go, and demons might invade, or magic calamities affect the lands.  In all these cases it is good to know what the terrain is made of and what grows there. That way you can turn all the vegetation in an area brown, black, or grey to indicate a blight, or change the color of deciduous trees to indicate fall but leave the pines and other evergreen trees the same color for your seasonal maps. This can speed up editing and improve the result a lot but providing the right data in the right format.

Area data is mostly stored using masks, a greyscale image with brighter pixels indicating a presence of something. This is great when you want precision, like for elevation using heightmaps. Another way of storing areal data is to use a Splat Map, it is a color image using each of its RGB channels to store data of some variable. Some image formats like PNG also comes with a transparency channel with means you can store four masks in the same file, improving storage efficiency and handling. For other use cases you do not need precision, instead you need to know which of several variables a particular area has, so you can use the color of that pixel to indicate a binary value. This way you can replace lots of masks with one image and save lots of storage and by using the appropriate colors also make them directly usable. Below is the set of colors I have used for my Shield Lands Splat maps.

By using various selection tools in World Machine, you can decide what type of terrain goes where. Remember I wrote about lakes and rivers in an earlier post, the result of that work was a mask that is now the source for which pixels will be water. Selection can be straight forward, like above or below a certain elevation, to extraordinarily complex like erosion flow zones phasing between 90 to 270 degrees and with and not steeper than 55 degrees for example. The variations are practically endless, but the key is to try and figure out where trees or grass grow turn that into rules and select for it. Below is an example of what a splat map in progress can look like.

And with added shading to make it more understandable.

It is still very much a work in progress, trees and bushes are still to be added and just like with the rivers an artistic step using Photoshop is needed to polish it up and remove some ugly bits that pop up here and there. To assist in the Photoshop editing the same masks that was used in the water editing can be used in this step as well. Since we are not messing with the elevation the terrain stays consistent and we can eliminate changes to the terrain that so often comes from changing the size and placement of the render area, which means you can create a smaller render area to quickly preview it in full resolution. When you work with elevation fractals the previews can be very misleading, by getting all the terrain building done in the first phase we now have a much more stable and predictable environment to work in getting the details right.

Splat Maps also have a key function as a coordinator between formats, for example to make sure that the large format texture matches the details generated in a game engine gets textures and models of trees and bushes in the right place and of the right type. Another example is in GIS you can use the Splat Map to create matching vector shapes and styles that are in the right place.

By using colors that are reasonably natural even the plat map can be understood and useful, but it is as a template for creating the final textures it shines. Looking at it even in this unfinished state I like it and combine it with the elevation, and we can start to see the final landscape emerge.

Next installment in this series will be creating the final textures using World Machine, Photoshop, and the Splat Map.

Thank you again for all your support!!

After a series of very technical posts, it is time to go back to the World of Greyhawk. This time as literally as possible and trying to figure out what the land looks like, surveying in cartography speak.  In real world mapping this is done by combining field measurement, aerial and satellite imaging and so on, but how do you survey a world that does not exist?

My approach to fantasy surveying is to use all the available sources in the form of texts and maps, real world inspiration and use logic to try and create a landscape that would fit the inhabitants and stories. Text is in my opinion often more reliable than illustrations and maps, maps and art is usually created by outsiders with limited knowledge of the setting, and tight time and monetary constraints. This factor often makes the text more accurate than accompanying material, a big caveat to this is that some writers does not seem to pay much attention to geography. Landscape is often not even mentioned, and if it is features are added either as flavor or because they are needed for the story. This makes it hard to deduct geography from RPG material, and there are lots of inconsistencies.  Small details are given lots of attention and vars areas are just glossed over. My job as a fantasy cartographer is in many ways to fill in all those huge gaps, to glue the few details mentioned, together.

For my campaign and as a first test area for a new generation of Greyhawk maps I am doing this for the Southern Shield lands, so let us investigate this process in more detail. Phase one is to look at the sources, in this case: The 1983 Greyhawk Boxed Set, From the Ashes Boxed Set, Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, each of them came with a setting map. Living Greyhawk modules and some fan created content gives a decent amount to go through.

To better understand the texts, I want to first go over the maps, starting with the oldest. In this case that is an old Greyhawk setting map that comes from Len Lakofka. I think it predates the Darlene map, and it is interesting since it is in large feature complete but still very rudimentary. The Shield Lands shows the layout we are familiar with from later maps with the exception that Admundfort is in the middle of Walworth Isle.

Next in line is the defining map of Greyhawk by Darlene. Its sweeping lines and shaded coastlines are beautiful and combined with the 30-mile hexes it gives us a basic understanding of the geography.

Next up is the Greyhawk map that came with Dungeon Magazine by Rob Lazzaretti. It is different in style from the Darlene map, but shows the same general geography. Many new settlements make their first appearance on this map, and Axeport, Herechel and Bright Sentry show up in our area of interest.

Living Greyhawk campaign was a source of a plethora of maps ranging from maps that are solid additions to the lore of the setting to maps that should in my humble opinion never have been made. I have found one map, apart from the Lazzaretti map, of the Shield Lands from the LG era. The map below adds several new settlements from the LG modules, but nothing else that we did not already know from the other maps.

Thankfully, Eric Anondson created a series of fantastic Greyhawk maps adding a lot of details from the LG era, it was and still is some of the best Greyhawk mapping and a huge inspiration for my Greyhawk mapping. I started my efforts before he did, but worked so slowly that he quickly covered more than I did, which gave me the chance to be inspired by his great work.

Erics map gives us a first look at how the elevation of the land and how it is drained and confirms the placement of settlements added in the LG modules. There is one river system that reaches a large part of the interior of the Shield Lands and flows into the Nyr Dyv west of Axeport. If the major port along the coast is not placed at the estuary is telling, if the river was easily accessible by boats it should have a settlement housing those who exploits the trade opportunities. Making the estuary of this river, that I named the Sanstin in my campaign, a shallow marshy delta stretching inland for several miles would make the Shield Landers looking for a better place to build a port.

Naming conventions for places can have many roots, and it this case I thought placing Axeport on a small peninsula that is vaguely axe-shaped could ad a bit more realism to the landscape.

I made Axeport a large town in my campaign which is why the guide overlay reflects that.

The Veng must be a huge river in the same league as the Mississippi or Volga rivers depositing large masses of sediment into the Nyr Dyv making this part of the lake shallow and muddy. Scragholm Isle has a core of rock that parted the river but is mostly made up of sediment that have solidified over time making it flat with marshy edges.

Critwall I reason is located where it is due to both good access to river and lake traffic and by placing it on a slightly elevated peninsula gives is both good flood protection and makes it easier to defend. The next major settlement along the coast eastward being Axeport some 70 miles to the east gives us a lot of coastline to detail.

Next step is to work out the climate, and here there are way more to go on. The Shield Lands are stated to be in the temperate zone, and the small overview map on p18 in the 1983 Glossography gives it a northern latitude of 40 degrees. This is equivalent to the Great Lakes area in North America or the northern coast of the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. The latitude is only one component in the climate, how dry is it, how are the seasons, and where does the wind usually come from are other huge factors to way in. Oerth also have a larger axial tilt of 30 degrees which will enhance the seasons.

Oerik is a huge continent larger than Eurasia and the Flanaess are larger than Europe wo we can assume that the Shield Lands would have an inland climate moderated a bit by the Nyr Dyv’s mass of water but exaggerated by the axial tilt. The Flanaess has mountain ranges in the west and east, with the west being massive, this should leave the center of the Flanaess less humid with dry hot summers and not overly wet cold winters.

The texts hardly mention geography at all which and combined with the lack of map features gives us a good reason to presume that the area can best be described as plain, combines this with it being a bit dry and having an inland climate and grassy plains would be the dominating landscape. Sounds boring, so now it is time to add in detail and creativity!

We have a huge volcano and an out of this world sized rift a few hundred miles to the north east, so we have geological activity for sure. This means we have fault lines; old lava flows and other interesting features to add. Maybe not in the immediate area of interest, but things can and often should be worked in gradually, so we need to keep this in mind.

The geological history of the area is also especially important, has it been covered with ice, how old is it, has it been flooded often or recently, was it more humid in the past. Cannot find anything in the texts about this so we must improvise a bit. I will hold off on glacial erosion for now, faults and volcanic activity is enough to work with. My assumption will be that the area is generally sedimentary, meaning it is old lake or sea bottom that have risen to form the land. Geological forces in the past have created a rolling landscape with low hills here and there, and volcanic activity over the eons have sprinkled it with occasional stand out features, from old worn-down craters to lava flow areas forming craggy ridges and mesas.

Depressions in flat landscapes tend to fill up with water, and if the waterfall is rich and regular rivers form and erode the land further making some lakes disappear and creating new ones in other locations. All this means that there should be way more lakes that are on the almost lake free maps that we have seen so far, and in not so wet climate of the current Shield Lands there should be lots of old dry lakebeds now overgrown with grass or bogs that are either dried out or still wet.

Vegetation will be mostly bushes and trees near rivers and other wetter areas. The few hills and higher terrain could be home to more vegetation due to humidity from clouds being more common that down in the lowlands. Similarly, the river valleys and other low spots in the landscape could get a bit more fog and mist making them home to more vegetation. Edges of rivers and marshes would also often have a string of vegetation.  If trees are scarce areas close to settlement might have even less due to humans cutting down most of the few trees for building material. Firewood can often be replaced by peat to save timber for better use.

With these thoughts I am setting off to visualize the landscape of the Shield Lands, I hope I have inspired you to give fantasy lands some extra attention in your gaming!

Here comes a look at how to create realistic lakes and rivers detailed enough to match the high resolution of 5 ft per pixel that is the target for this series of maps. World Machine does an admirable job of naturally eroding the landscape to create a realistic large area drainage and then also add lakes as well. The problem is that it creates rivers and lakes everywhere that can possibly form, and they look a bit stilted at this high resolution, so a bit of manual artistic touch up is needed.

Below is first a top down views of the terrain with all the WM lakes and rivers in blue, and then the second image with my edited layer on top in lighter blue.

To make the export of the final mask easy I create a new layer, make it solid white and give it a mask that I can use black or white which makes all my adjustments non-destructive. A color overlay makes them easy to see and mean I can adjust visibility while working and keep mask functionally intact. A solid black layer underneath an turn off color overlay and the mask is ready to be exported.

I save it as a TIFF or PNG file which WM prefers for masks. Import it back into WM again using a File input device, and it is easy to place it if you have the same extent active as you used for the export, just click the "Place in Current View" button will get it right. And now we have the adjusted lakes and river system in World Machine. Note that this is only a test, so I have not done all the lakes and rivers, far from it. I need to spend another day or so getting the whole 16K area done. The first areas while take a lot of extra time learning a creating the right brush setting, but effectiveness will come with experience, so future areas will be done much faster. the type of terrain also plays a large role, some areas have a lot of lakes and rivers, and some might even be so water-rich that they fill out almost every possible area and little adjustment is needed.

Below is how it looks in WM using the newly created mask.

Next up after this step is to take this primitive elevation coloring and create realistic texturing and all the data needed for further enhancement in Photoshop, QGIS and Unreal.

Thank you all for your support, it is literary a lifeline for me!! 🙂

Time for the next installment in my series in how to map the World of Greyhawk, all over again. My last post was about how to use fractals to create the shape of the terrain, now its time to lift the perspective and look at the big picture. How to build the world, one piece at at time.

Even the best of computers cannot recreate a whole virtual world full of details and color in one go, it is like eating an elephant, it has to be done one piece at a time. Add the quirkiness of terrain generation tools to the mix and it requires you to be both careful and daring, and to plan how you do it. It has taken me years to figure out how to do it, trial an error and learning from others attempts. This says as much about my intelligence as it does about the difficulty in doing this, I don't advice anyone to do this unless they are VERY passionate and possess a large potion of stubbornness, if that is the case you should definitely do this. You will have something to occupy you for a very long time 🙂

When you have fiddled around with the fractals and have created a bit of terrain that looks perfect, as a world cartographer like me you get fond of it and want to save it and shift focus a bit and add more carefully shaped terrain next to it. This is where one of the many quirks of CG terrain creation tools come in to play, when you shift focus ever so slightly the results change. The same happens when you look at things close up or further away, and I find it VERY annoying and it took me along time to learn to live with it and figure out how to work around it. 

The way I have decided to deal with this problem is to first calculate how large of an area you can render at your desired resolution. The desired final resolution is 5ft, and the maximum render resolution is 16K (16,384 px). So a 16K map @5ft per pixel is 81,920 ft which is 15.51515151515152 miles. This is not rocket science and no real creatures are going to get hurt, so lets round it off to one decimal 15.5 miles. Hopefully it will be possible to work with bigger renders in the future, but right now this is the size we have to work with. there is an option of using tiles to cover larger areas in single render. It comes with its own set of problems so I'm going to avoid using it if possible, but it is an option that is good to keep in mind, and I'm also recommending to use a workflow that retain that option. This is another reason I decided to split terrain generation from the water creation and texturing.

Rendering of an 16K area take my now venerable 8 core Intel workstation around 6 hours or so for the height map alone. So if you don't have one of those new 32 or 64 core Threadripper monsters, I recommend to have a separate computer that can crunch in the background while you can work on other things. Overnight I often set both computers to render to speeding up things. The result of the render needs to be exported into some sort of file and stored for suture use. The only thing needed from this fist stage is the elevation data in the form of an height map. An heightmap is just an greyscale image with the higher areas being indicated by brighter and brighter grey. Any type if bitmap format that can handle greyscale images can be used, the key issue is the bit rate which is effectively the vertical resolution. Most images we take with our phones or see on the web are 8-bit, which is great for Minecraft like terrain but for detailed real world like mapping we need way more so its 16-bit minimum and preferable 32-bit. The files get significantly bigger with each increase but it is necessary to keep our options open. World Machine has a built in 32-bit native format that saves the date as a WM Library, the downside to this is that the data can only be used back in world Machine again, but at this stage that is not a big problem. The huge bonus is that the date is geo-located, so when it is imported back into a new WM project the it knows its place. This saves a lot of note taking and keeps the precision really high.

Importing the saved WM library file makes the next CG terrain quirk apparent, raised edges. When you render an area the center bits match each other almost perfectly but the edges stick up and need to be masked off manually by using a set of Layout Generators like this:

It is a bit of a fiddly nuisance at times, but with a bit of blur here and there added the result are usually more than acceptable. Now we have a ready rendered area to add to that are fixed so no nasty fractal surprises and to look at it in high resolution is much faster since all the hard work calculating fractals and erosion are already done. By using WM Library devices and keeping the exact same settings for the guide map, working on areas using different WM project files becomes possible without sacrificing quality. Instead of using a huge WM file with a large amount of terrain recipes in order to create everything from arctic mountains carved out from glacial ice to wind eroded deserts landscapes in single file, we can now use lots of file instead and export an import between them. The drawback is that you have to render at the full resolution at all times. I have tested use a master terrain rendered at lower resolution that covers the whole area first, and then scale it up to add detail but found it lacking in variation. Even at lower resolution you need to have a huge variation to create a believable landscape covering an area as large as the Flanaess, and a fantasy world should look even more impressive in places. This require fractal combinations in the hundreds, with as many different erosion variants and settings as well.

The first job is to be artistic and first try out different fractal combinations together with filters and different erosion settings, then you need to play around using Layout Generators to create the landscape you need. Then comes the tedious rendering, exporting and then import back the results and mask the ugly overlapping bits. Water is next, to map out the areas that can become lakes and rivers, and create the ocean surface or in this case the surface of the mighty Nyr Dyv. Fir this WM comes with a built in Create Water device, and as you can see in the screenshot below, it is not fully compatible with tiled builds. Lots of nifty and handy devices comes with this limitation which so try and use a non tiled approach if possible when you are using World Machine.

Next is a very time saving follow up device with a cryptic name of Composite Type, it is one of the hidden gems in WM. Another user pointed it out to me when I complained to have to fill in all the lakes manually. The Composite Type Device will do this automatically for you, and it will also give you a depth map, which is great for texturing which I will cover in a post coming soon. The Create water and its ability to generate a complete and believable natural looking lake and river system is a godsend and one of the major reasons I'm using WM, no other tool does this, this well yet. The catch, and there always is a catch in CG terrain work, is that you always get a maxed out set of lakes and rivers. In some areas that are rain drenched and relatively you genealogically speaking, this works great. Most areas though comes with a bit less rainfall and lakes have over time partially of fully filled up creating marshlands bogs or flat solid land instead of the lake that once filled the valley. Rivers carve out a deep valley but then are reduced to a lesser flow that meanders thought the old river depression. This requires new set of render, export, artistic intervention using Photoshop and then import back into World Machine again. It is tedious work but actually rather relaxing and fulfilling, it is hands on world building without waits for renders. It will also be the topic for a post in the series on how to map the World of Greyhawk coming very soon.

This was the post I was planning to post first today then the Ritersmarche area update got ready early and I posted that one first. First let me say welcome to all the new patreon members, thank you so much for making this possible!!! 🙂 The Greyhawk 2.0 project is experiences both setbacks and successes, it is one step back and two steps forward. I was hoping to use the new World Machine 4, but that seems to be a bit premature. One of the key features for me is to have overview, when you map large areas you need to have an idea of what this look like on a larger scale. This has always been where World Machine stood out against the competition. In the latest version emphasis have shifted more towards better view of the area in focus losing some of that overview. This is probably something that most artists and game developers like, but a problem for me. Thankfully the old version is still here, and I can have both installed side by side and use the best of both, and with a few updates WM4 might be as good as WM3 in this regard.

The image above shows how much of the world I've mapped at the first stage so far. From the Critwall peninsula and Scragholm Island in the foreground to the former Shield Land coast all the way past Axeport to Battledown in the east. The vertical coverage from - 1 km (0.6 miles) to 10 km (6.2 miles) with 32bit which means enough resolution to make it all smooth where that is needed and sharp when that is needed.

There are more water in this stage than it will be in the final version, especially lakes and rivers. The texturing at this stage show all the areas that CAN be lakes, rivers and other wetlands as blue. I will mask that down to a more reasonable level at the next stage, converting some of the blue areas to marchland or just flat land areas. This process will mostly be artistic and done manually in photoshop and then re imported into World Machine to feed the next step. This first step is mainly about terrain building, so lets take a closer look at how that is done.

Most computer generated terrain generated using fractals, and World Machine comes with three different fractals generators Basic Noise, Advanced Perlin and Voronoi. The first two are both perlin generators but with different ways to do the settings.

Here are an example of a Basic Noise output

and output from an Advanced Perlin generator

Perlin noise is great for creating all that under-laying fluctuations in landscapes, especially lowlands and the variations of large areas that are only visible against the horizon or from a high vantage point. These minute variations in landscape elevation forms the basis for lakes and rivers and how water flows across continents, and this is one of the main base data for texturing so even if it is hard to see the differences, the play a huge role later in the process.

Voronoi is a bit different, it created various forms of angular patterns in the forms of triangles or squares, sometimes very pure or broken up into intricate patterns. Voronoi can be used for a range of things from forming the base for large massive mountains to the pattern of farming fields around a village and even a random placements of houses in a city.

Fractals are rarely used in simple and pure forms, it is when you blend and tweak them the magic starts happening. You can blend data from tow generators using a Combiner, ad the data can be added, subtracted, multiplied or mixed in over ten different ways. Photoshop users recognize that this is just like layers of pixels can be blended in images, it is all the same type of manipulation of data.

Below is an example of how I have set it up in WM, this is a simple setup using a single Advanced Perlin generator. Fractals look repetitive over larger areas which in usually not the case in nature, so that need to be fixed. Large area variation is created by introducing distortion, which is created using a Distortion Generator. To make it more complicated the Distortion Generator needs to be given a pattern for the distortion and for that I've used two additional Advanced Perlin Generators one for the N-S (X) axis, and one for the E-W (Y) axis. WM works using gray-scale heightmaps so Z axis is not needed.

The generated fractal data is then fed into a Flow Restructure device, which makes sure all the valleys are flowing downhill creating realistic drainage. This device is a godsend but a late comer to WM, and if you look at all my maps so far they are not realistic in this regard. Thanks to this nifty device and its companion device Create Water it is now possible to create realistic lakes and rivers automatically. The data is then sent to an Erosion device and then a Clamp device to reduce it to form lowlands. Erosion is huge rabbit hole that needs to be looked at specially, so I'm going to skip over it today. 

The green device labeled TER1 at the bottom of the group is a Layout Generator that let you create vector masks telling WM exactly where and how much you want this terrain to cover. A Blur Device smooth out the edges of the vector masks to make them blend in a bit more, and then a combiner with the Max blend mode integrate the data into the rest of the terrain.     

More complicated versions of this uses two or more chains like this blended together in various ways.

You can learn my by watching my introduction to World Machine YouTube videos:    (56) Anna Meyer - YouTube or even better resources  can be found here: https://www.world-machine.com/resources.php?page=tutorials

Here comes an small update that have been on my to do list a long time, make the Rittersmarche area to better match WGQ1 Patriots of Ulek.

Changed the Jewel river to flow a bit  more easterly further into the Suss. The town of Riddlings pass is now moved to the foothills west of Rittersmarche, and the foothills themselves have been moved west creating a larger grassy plain area between the Suss and the southern Lortmils.

The Suel Temple ruins had to be moved east to stay on the Suss side of the Jewel. I think that the new location near the Troll Creek and the Suss fens are even more appropriate.

Oakenburgh and Brenfluss now have the town symbols to reflect their true sizes.

All these changes will be on the 2021 map update.

A large thanks to Vincent Mattelaer for helping me research this area!