Here is an example of how a days work can be when you're a Fantasy Cartographer.
Here is a link to my highres Flanaess Terrain image:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k1bgc9xvvad29cv/Terrain%20600ppi%20layered%20160712.psb?dl=0
This is a PSB (Photoshop Large Format) file that is 15.6 GB in size so its not for every computer and Photoshop is the only application I know of that support PSB-files. Even Adobes other applications like Illustrator doesn't support it. But in order to get the best possible detail this is the file to use!
I will chop it up into pieces and share the pieces later when we get more into Flanaess mapping and the use of Guide Maps. But in the mean time here you can grab something I've never shared with anyone before!
As all us Greyhawk fans I'm getting ready to celebrate Needfest and the new year soon to be upon us, and what better way of doing it that to spend a day working on Lendore Isle!
In a burst of creative ideas I just needed to test a new approach to reuse my Flanaess map as a direct base for a 3D version. This involves (as so much of mapping work) masking, so today have been mostly spent in Photoshop painting white to mask the ocean.
As a source I'm using a 600 dpi version of my Flanaess terrain, instead of the 200 dpi version used in the final map. I which I could have used it for the final Flanaess map but it is a hefty 15.3 GB in size, and with symbols and text it would bring almost any knows PC (personal computer that is) to its knees. So I had to cut it down to a third of the resolution.
As a special Needfest gift I'm going to share the high resolution terrain file with all the Cartographer Level backers for their personal projects.
Patreon Project 2 - Islands are also progressing, did all the forests yesterday and will dig into beaches and water texture in a day or two, after I have made a couple of videos that will be posted here for various backer levels.
How to best celebrate Needfest, well I leave that up to you with a which that your New Year festivities will be wonderful!
I also want to say a special welcome to all our new backers, welcome aboard and thank you so much for your support!
I can't keep this a secret any longer. In my job you constantly have to try and do the impossible and even worse, invent better ways of doing the impossible in order to get better results with less work. The main constraint are either technical or not enough time or both.
Back in the 1990's when I laid down the foundations for my Flanaess map the only real option was Bryce 3D, and the 3D is in my case more of a misnomer, I couldn't really create 3D maps. To get something that looks cool and could be done in a reasonable amount of time I had to settle for a top down view of a "Fake 3D" world.
Now it is 25 years later and maybe even a garage opener are way more powerful than the Pentium I used back then. The same goes for software which can now handle thousands if not even many millions times more data effectively, that is the main reason I started to use World Machine.
What World Machine couldn't do very effectively (and believe when I say I've tried) to create 3D terrain that accurately match the top down images of my Flanaess map. To do that effectively you need a more artistic approach that are highly controllable. That artistic control are now becoming a reality!
The latest version of Vue have support for using your Wacom Pen to sculpt or paint terrain elevation, and Gaea are set to have that support as well. This makes me confident enough to say that it is time to look into a fully 3D version of my Flanaess map!
This also opens up another of my Holy Grail's of mapping (been watching Knightfall too much), start big and then detail certain areas as desired. I've already started to work on a World Machine template to create new terrain that will closely match my old Bryce terrain.
This is created in one tench the scale which means it can be done many times faster. This terrain can then be imported into Gaea and Vue for refinement and rendering of small area maps in much more detail.
There are still some kinks to work out, but I'm confident enough to say it will work and work well. To combine the power of fractals with an artistic flair is what made me a mapper in the first place, and now is the time to bring that combination into the 21st century.
To celebrate my 20th year Flanaess anniversary with a renewal of the old in a new way have me really stoked for next year, and I wanted to share that with you guys before going public with this. there are some more experimentation to do, and I need to spend around $1600 on a Vue upgrade, but its looking very promising indeed!
Those of you who read my thank you post, noticed that I stated that next fall my goal is to take a year off to do what I like the most mapping my campaign. Yes I want to lay all other mapping aside for a year to get back into the Greyhawk groove again!
Why wait until next fall and what am I going to work on?
The delayed start no later than August comes primarily that I have commissioned work scheduled in parallel to Patreon pretty much until then, and the 20 year mark is October 2018. So those two reasons make fall a good time to start. A third reason is that I want to have some of the new tools up and running by then as well.
What I'm going to work on is pretty much up to you guys! With a full year of full time work means we can do quite a lot. There are several things to consider. Large of small projects, research and technical limitations are the first ones in my mind.
Project ideas I'm thinking of are: Iconic locations, historic, trade, climate ocean currents, new lands are obvious candidates to me. There are also some stuff I'm thinking of that are not really maps but something I always wanted to do, things like scripts and symbols of the Flanaess, more heraldry, architectural styles.
Some are better candidates than others, i'm just listing things that I always wanted to do. An obvious category I didn't mention is city maps, for that one there are some super cool tools that I would love to make use of. They are expensive and requires some learning so might not be withing my budged (both time and money wise) for next year. So a Greyhawk City project I would like to hold off a year or two on 😉
Research will be a vital part of this project so any and all help will be very much appreciated. We need to set up some better way to collaborate next year. Discord, Google Hangouts or something, whatever might work best.
This might be what is needed to bring this Patreon up to full speed and make real progress and bring in more people!
Thank you again for supporting me, I'm really looking forward to next year 🙂
I hope you all had a great Christmas and got a chance to catch up with family and friends. I had a great couple of days with family and also finally took the time to replace my 14 year old car with a new one. It was out of necessity, the old one was falling apart, and as you well know I've had enough of things falling apart lately!
Today I'm back at my (still sit down only) desk again working on the Island Project making good progress. Ground texturing pretty much done and a good part of vegetation as well. Water and beaches still need a work over.
The forest is still only conifers the leafy trees are still to be added into the mix. First a look at the texture:
and then the shading:
These two will be properly rendered and then imported into Photoshop for the final touch up and top down map. There will be special posts and videos about that part when I get there in a week or so. Before then there will be basic and advanced posts and videos explaining texturing and forests in World Machine, expect them in a day or two.
Thank you all for joining my Patreon, its been a goal of mine for years to do this and now its finally coming true. Only one small project done so far, but its only been a couple of months, and the there are more to come, much more. This time of year despite all the hectic preparations for festivities and family gatherings, it is still important for me to try and sum up my efforts and to set up my future goals.
This year has been mainly about Midgard, a huge undertaking that have keep me busy for over a year. Midgard have been the second biggest project of my career weighing in just after my Flanaess map. If you include the Southlands it is in many respects my biggest project to date that have spanned over the last three years. This year I've also managed to do about a dozen other small projects for novels, the computer screen, a number of adventures and a map of a real world resort!
Next year its time to leave Midgard, at least for a time, and come back to old familiar turfs. There is a special reason for this, my career as a fantasy cartographer started. It began very humbly when in 1996 I lay my hands on Bryce 3D and decided to try and learn to use it and create a map for my Greyhawk campaign. I struggled for a few years and started to get result I liked, something called the Internet came along and I decided to share my work some years later and the rest you know!
Below is what my first mapped bits that are still part of the final Flanaess map looks like. It is a piece of the Wild Coast that I cherish not for the quality but for the memories of all the struggle it took to create it. It dates from October 1998.
After twenty years it is time to return to my roots and recharge my creativity byt doing what I love the most, mapping my campaign. Starting next fall my goal is to dedicate a whole year to Greyhawk mapping, and Patreon will be the place where things will be around with previews and decisions of what should be done!
Technically 2018 will probably be a year of big change, maybe not in the end result but in how to get there. New tools that are harnessing the capabilities of modern computer graphics are finally starting to arrive, and instead of gazing at small fuzzy preview ports that takes forever to update you can see things in almost full glory instantly. This will cut most of the wait and most of the guess work out of the equation, and I will not miss the minutes of waiting every time I make a change, just too see that the results are not what I intended.
The now old World Machine will get some needed competition in the race for best high quality terrain generation software. There are a number of contenders including World Machine itself, but I doubt that Stephen Schmitt will be able to ramp up his development to keep up with the others. Two new hot contenders are Gaea and Instant Terra, both make extensive use of GPU power and have a modern flexible UI. Terragen and Vue are still in the race for the best tool for CG terrain as well. A dark horse in this race are the game engine tools like World Creator for Unity.
I work with large worlds which means I have special needs that are not what most users who create for computer games or illustrations have. This is one of the main reasons I like World Machine so much and have stuck with it despite a lackluster development progress. Both Instant Terra and Gaea seem to be able to match or surpass World Machine in this critical aspect and they also have the fractal and advanced erosive pluming needed to create great looking landscapes. Gaea promises to take things further in a a way that I have always dreamt of, an artistic driven approach. Applied on top of the fractal mess and technical pluming that are needed, but throws me off target way too often, it can do wonders for my creative focus.
The other side of my work is the gaming side of things, to make the result more useful and inspiring. This is something that will be my main focus moving forward. In order to try and accomplish this I pledge to game more and regularly, as a player in others games but also to run my own games. My Greyhawk gaming have been on a three year hiatus and to start again as a part of mapping the world of Greyhawk again will go hand in hand. The first project will be Lendore Isle early next year.
The other goal for next year it to learn new tools, and advance my skills in a few of the ones I'm already using. When it comes to old tools Vue is highest on my list, its been in my inventory for eight years and still my skills are only basic. By the end of next year I want to bring my Vue mojo up to a professional level. The latest version of Vue also have better terrain generating capabilities which makes it even more interesting, and the rendering features are second to none. This has been my main reason to use Vue so far, but I want to expand the use as a foundation for future endeavors into more close up mapping. Things like locations, cities and battle maps are tasks that Vue can be a superb tool for.
Realm Works and Hero Lab deserves a special mention here since I have been using them a lot for several years as a player and in the background. Next year I will bring forth that work in the public light as a part of both my own games and how to use my maps.
New tools topping my list to learn are Gaea and Other World Mapper. Tools I will start to look into next year are Geographical Information Systems (GIS) both Open Source and commercial tools. My time and capacity to learn will probably be met and exceeded with this, but just in case there are more inspiration the game engine Unity have been in my sights for several years.
I love to keep myself busy, creating and pushing new boundaries. I need your help in this. both to make it possible to set other things aside and to keep me focused and inspired. Thank you again for all your help and support, I could not do this without you!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years, together we can visit the most amazing places.
Anna
This is not as bad as it seems, but I had a desk malfunction and it will take a few days to get things up and running again. My adjustable desk stopped working and I was a bit too eager to fix it and it came crashing down.
I live in a very earthquake prone area so thankfully I had bolted my monitors firmly onto the desk, and they made it!
New parts are on their way, and in the mean time I'll use the desk in lower mode. But it will still take a few days to get things set up again.
Thank you for your patients and support!
When you work on complicated projects in software like World Machine, you often face problems that seems hopeless at first, but widen your view a bit and think logically and possibilities opens up.
Here is an example of how I solved (or at least improved) the creation of wetlands on flat areas surrounding lakes and rivers.
Here is a link to the latest version of the WM file. A warning - this file is my development file, so it contains some "spaghetti" that might behave as a form of cartographic web spell. So tread carefully! 🙂
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ter3mq29zrzkse1/Islands%20Low-76.tmd?dl=0
