Work on the second project, Islands are under way and making good progress!

This will be my first ever "fully featured" project, meaning it will be properly mapped in 3D with rivers, forests, roads and settlements. All my previous maps have had to include shortcuts or cheats using Photoshop or Illustrator to make things afterwards due to technical or time constraints. 

All the programming for the features are in place, what remains now is to model the terrain, texturing and a final tweaking of settings before rendering.

More videos and in depth posts will come next week. This weekend I will be in Philadelphia for PAX Unplugged. If you are at the con you can find me in the Lonewolf Development booth.

Thank you again for your support!

Here is a short video introducing the very basics of 3D terrain creation and World Machine. 

Here is a first sneak peak at what it looks like at the moment. This is after a day of texturing. Still a bit rough and not anywhere enough variation, and no foresting yet, but I'm very pleased with it so far. 

I've done a first video presenting (or at least trying to) show the Island Project. Please forgive the totally unscripted presentation, just made it to see if it worked and it did so I'm uploading it,

The more technical side of the Patreon are getting a home - Egos!
It will be a (infinite?) series of areas 150 miles to the side. Maybe this can be increased to 200 miles or more, but for the first project set in Egos, Island, it will be 150 miles.  Three times the size of the Crater project.

My idea with this is to try and make my development maps useful and useful together in a larger context, like a whole continent. The image shows the terrain types and additional types of maps that I want to cover.

With all the climate types and variations it will be almost a hundred different variations.  Doing 10 a year means that it will take a decade to cover every type, but I'm betting on having better tools and faster computers in the future and will try and make it in less than 5 years.

This will be the development side of the Patreon, and the other half will be the implementation side of it. For that I'm planning to do maps set in Greyhawk mostly and then maybe other settings as well if there are good grounds for developing for them.

Why not use Greyhawk for development?

The main reasons are simplicity, by not having to map a particular world and match its existing maps, I can condense features to better suit my development needs.

The Flanaess lacks several of the terrain types I want to have in my set of "recipes", and I also need to create the in between terrain types. Using a world that I can set things to be as effective as possible in developing the technological side can work out the kinks before risking things on a real campaign setting.

The second reason is that when areas are developed I can sell the maps on contents markets and earn some extra money, which means need to spend less time working on other things.

Long term goals

When this project is more underway in a year or so there will be a more and more useful set of templates usable for other projects, like mapping Campaign Settings and iconic locations. If the Patreon is successful enough there will be opportunities for others (preferably Patreons) who can be hired on a freelance basis to help me with creation of content. 

Another goal is to introduce other specialties and invite experts in those fields to help out in both creation and teaching techniques. I'm thinking city mapping, 3D object creation, buildings and dungeon mapping.

There are already several fantastic Patreons that does this, and I hope to be able to establish some sort of cooperation that will make the content we can produce both higher quality and be done faster using experts in respective areas. But this is all a year or more in the future.  

Short term goals

The next couple of months my plan is to do the Island Project part 1 and 2, and Egos Island and Lendore Isle. 

The next project I want to do is a subcontinent with at least two new climate types that we didn't cover in any of the island projects. The main goals for this project is to test scale and scope. I want to make sure things doesn't brake down when I  start working on a 1000 square miles, and that things can be reassembled properly after rendering.

A side goal with this project is to get another set of climate and terrain types covered as well. Since Lendore Isle sits in the Seasonal to Warm Seasonal zones, we need to go either far north or down towards the tropics for the subcontinent. This need to be debated and polled when we get closer. 

A third goal for the subcontinent project is to figure out what need to be stored in order for maps to be expanded and worked on later. If possible I want to avoid having to export every bit of terrain and masks as high resolution TIFFs. Hopefully the World Machine TMD files will be enough, which means whole world can be store in a few hundred MB rather than a few hundred GB.  

The inaugural project is done, thank you all for making it possible! Now its time to see how it went and what can be done to improve things in the future. The goal for this project was to get to grips with Patron and how it works, set map quality standards and create a base for future projects. I choose the theme in order to limit the complexity of the map, meaning no water or vegetation quite literary just the bare rock. So how did it go? Here I of course need your input but here are my views.

The Crater map is both some of my best work so far but also probably my most useless map ever. Technically I overcame a lot of limitations that I have struggled with until now, like vertical resolution and modularity. Most projects I've done so far have been huge areas that had to be mapped in a for the task very short time span. This required lots of cheating in the form of editing images afterwards rather than building the world properly. This project was 30 miles across and could be done in a month, which hopefully means that when no new major features have to be developed a much larger area can be mapped in the same time. The next project I'll try and make it at least 4 times the size.

Final quality is where I hoped it would be with an extremely detailed map at 10 per pixel. Just a bunch of desert dust and rocks but highly detailed desert! I'm most happy with how well the isometric perspective turned out, and that I could use Vue to create it. A bit of inconsistency in the 3D renderings, using different atmospheres and haphazard camera views which don't help determine size and scale. This is another of my criticisms of this project, no proper sense of scale. I need to figure out a better way than just a simple distance marker to indicate scale. Scale presentation in 3D is high on my list on things to improve on for future projects.  

Project updates, on commissioned work things are normally secret until launch so I need to better live up to the fack that I'm working for you guys. So the question is daily tidbits and rants of what I'm up to at the moment or a bit less frequent but more thought through reports, or both. Please let me know!

A major thing that I where not prepared enough for was the amount of interest in the Cartography Pledge Level. I'm VERY grateful for all of you who have pledge at this level, and I'm also not happy with how I have treated you so far. The main thing missing is video presentation. Most of the stuff I'm working with are hard to grasp, and I'm not a vary skilled writer (there are are reasons you do maps instead of adventure writing). Video presentation on how to do things are essential, and they will be part of all future projects. Maybe even interactive Google hangouts or something like that too if there are interest in that. 

The next project will be Islands and be in two different parts. Part one will be to use an island or group of islands to introduce water, vegetation and hopefully even basic roads and settlements. It will also be bi enough to have to be rendered in parts and then stitched back together again. This so we can make sure it it possible to map large areas and then reassemble them.  The second part will be Lendore Isle, which will be mapped under the guidance of Lenard Lakofka.  

Here are a few screen shots of my work with lakes, rivers and forests. They don't look like much yet, but I got the features working, and they are well integrated into the work flow. To make them look pretty is actually the easier part of the equation. 

Next post will be a presentation of Egos, my technical world that will be used for all the generic maps to develop things. Sounds a bit boring, but I think it can be quite the place in the future. It will have some of most impressive features ever mapped in 3D for any fantasy world. When we have it working in Egos, the same techniques can and will be used to map those iconic locations well cherish in our game worlds. And you can also use the locations in egos for your own campaign there of the name!  

Recently I had the pleasure of discussing maps in roleplaying with Johnn Four.

Johnn is a  a professional RPG author with 13 published books and three online courses on how to be a better game master. He co-wrote the Dungeon Master's Guide II, founded and anchored the GM Toolbox column in Dragon Magazine, and have been publishing the Roleplaying Tips Newsletter for GMs - 700 issues and counting - since 1999.  

You can find out more about what he doing here: https://www.roleplayingtips.com

Here is the Heraldry poster iin PDF format for better printing. The size is 36x24 inches.

Time for a first bonus project, the Heraldry of the nations of the Flanaess.

Soon time to wrap up Project 1: Crater, and as a part of of that I created a promo image. Before I share it I want you to take a look at it and also give you a chance to opt out of having your name on it.

Next up will be a critique post where I will try and sum up how well this project have fared and what to improve on in the future.