The mountains are generated in an app called Gaea, which for the purposes of this project can be the free 'community' version, since you don't need the ultra high resolution reserved for the purchased version. 1K is enough for a tiny CC3 symbol, and possibly slightly too much but you can't export height maps in any lower res than that, even in the community version. Surprisingly, even the free community version allows the artist to have commercial rights over their work, so you can use your work for profit if you wish. For this reason I have purchased the cheapest Indie version of the app as a sort of 'thank you' to Quadspinner for these generous terms.
And that's what it does. It uses fractal and colour nodes and their associate modifiers to generate heightmaps and colour maps. The 3D view is not currently exportable, and even if it was there is no isometric view. Only top down and true perspective. Here is a section of a screen shot showing Mountain 01
[Image_13877]
Having created the right kind of mountain with all its erosion and snow, to get the isometric projection I then have to import the heightmaps to Blender and use a displacement modifier on a plane to translate the heightmap into a 3D model. Then I use the exported colour maps from Gaea to create a blender material for it. There are 3 textures in the material used on the mountain. The first is a Blend that causes the base of the plane to blend out to transparency at the base of the mountain so I don't have to mess around forever trying to get it right by hand. The second is the colour map that gives the rock and snow its basic colour, and the third is a mask to make the snow shine while keeping the rock relatively matt.
[Image_13878]
Those black dashed lines you can see in the Blender screen shot (second image) are the lights. There are 6 of them, since I prefer to use Blender Render rather than Cycles (which drinks too much processor power for such a tiny job). One on the left is the true 'sun', while the other 5 are very dim bluish white backlighting lights to bring the shadow side of the model up from pitch back to an indirect lighting effect - blueish atmospheric light. I use lights like on a theatre stage instead of blender's indirect lighting or atmospheric tools because I have a lot more control over exactly what is lit, by how much, and what colour it is. It's not terribly easy if you haven't done it many times before over the years, so an alternative to my stage lighting scenario is to use Indirect lighting in the World settings. The disadvantage of doing that is that the indirect light cannot be tinted any particular colour unless you mess with the sky and atmosphere settings, and that's where it gets about a thousand times more complicated than just using an array of stage lights.
When I start to play with top view mountains I might try importing everything to Wilbur instead of Blender. Map files work, but they do tend to bleach out the colours quite badly. Since I haven't managed to solve that problem by graphical manipulation, I may just render the same Blender mountain models from directly above, like this.
The details are automatically generated by Gaea. I just choose which of the random mountains it produces with the node tree I built that I like the look of. I have ten so far, but there is potential for an infinite number - a bit like the number of worlds you can make in FT3.
The Blender part is the only complicated bit, but that's where all the useless stuff in my head comes into play. I've been using Blender since the very beginning. That must be about 15-20 years ago now, so I know all the hacks right back to the beginning. I'm not so hot with the modern stuff - the Cycles Render machine is beyond me. I don't like it because it feels unnecessarily complicated and the lighting effects in Cycles are ludicrously bad. I really don't know why they bothered when the original Blender engine is so much better and runs about 5x as fast.
They have a photorealistic quality that makes them very different than anything we have currently for overland maps. Personally, I would love to see a set like this that uses the top down approach to mountains and trees.
Over on the FB page they are proving to be a lot more popular than I thought they would. I made the mistake of assuming that because most other sets are ink and wash, beautifully drawn, then everyone would absolutely hate this idea!
Things will move very slowly from now on because I'm due to start a new job soon, but I will go down this direction for a while yet to see what happens.
I am very curious to see how a full style in this style would turn out. The detail level is incredible, perhaps a bit too much for large area maps like continents, but I can see some very beautiful results for local area maps here.
So am I, Remy, which is why I'll continue working on it for a while at least - find out if it's actually a practical way to go.
I agree on the detail front. Maybe this is more of a small regional map style done this way. If it works, though, I will be looking at the possibility of using the same fills and symbols but simplifying them by hand working them in Krita to make a style more appropriate to a world map, for instance.
I think it would be interesting to have a range of scale options in this style - Overland isometric, Overland plan view, and both of those with large, medium and small scale options.
Extremely nice and awesome that you can learn/use those tools. My eyes roll up in my head when I even think about looking at them to consider them for my use.
Its not so awesome, really. An awful lot of graphics apps I already have use nodes like Gaea. Vue, Genetica and Blender Cycles (I actually really hate Cycles!) all use node graphs to make things happen, so learning Gaea was relatively simple and more a case of experimenting. Its a bit like having a shiny brand new Lego set. You keep plugging these little bricks together and asking questions when they don't have the desired result, plugging them back together in the slightly different order recommended by other users, and eventually you get it right.
This is the node graph responsible for generating the regular, snow capped and arctic versions of mountain 01. It looks frightening, but the business end of it is actually the single thread part where the mountain is created and shaped. All that mess on the right is just sorting out different colours and masks. Its more about playing with stuff than knowing a lot.
Hi Sue, thank you for your explanation - I see, I still have much to learn! It is great that you are testing many applications and share both results and limitations of them with us. This leads often to new inspiration - what can be done with those applications and what probably not! Thank you! (and honestly I must admit that I still not comfortable with "optimal" lightning settings in 3D programs - where to put my lightning sources to get the most out of my renders...) Blender has gotten more easily after the 2.8 update - but its almost unlimited possibilities of settings make me crazy at times...
Too many settings in an app makes life unnecessarily complex, which is why I tend to ignore the new options and just carry on with my good old fashioned stage lighting and Blender Render machine. Being selectively blind makes the spacecraft-type GUI far less frightening. I know the controls I use and that's all I need.
But I am beginning to wonder if I'm going just a little bit overboard with this idea. If I have 30 mountains, then I would end up with 120 if I do 4 different versions of each. Maybe only 3 are really needed, and I can get rid of the green one that hasn't got any snow on it?
I'm also thinking that I may need to simplify them all so that they don't vanish into a mass of details as you zoom out again.
These are all wonderful. Why stop at 120? Or perhaps a set for several annuals, like Arctic; Desert; Temperate; Tropical etc. Trees for each region, special features for each, eg glaciers, icebergs, ice features etc for Arctic, with a bit of tundra thrown in - eg Canada, Greenland and Iceland. Even underwater mountains. Seriously, I think you wouldn't need more than 10-15 mountains in each set. Mike Schley's overland set contains 4 large mountains, and 9 smaller mountains for example. So with 10 and 4 sets, you finish up with 40, perhaps an easier number. 15=60.
Time limitations, Quenten, now that I have what normal people call 'a proper job' for the first time in 4 years
I tried to cash in on my imagination and artistic skills but it didn't work because I can't work fast enough to make it pay, so now I have a regular night job in a supermarket. This will slow me down quite considerably. The quality will be the same. It's just the quantity that will drop off quite a bit
I think it will look better if I dumb down the speckliness of that mountain grass textures. Those green mountains are disappearing in a snowstorm of dots.
SUE! I am in love with those mountains! What's the polygon count for them? I would love to see what you can do with more symbols like those. Since those are 3d models would that increase resources that cc3+ uses?
No worries, Quenten. We all have real lives. Mine just caught up with me at last :P
Farsight - Thank you! 13.6 million polys per mountain. It ended up that way because I used two separate Subivision Surface modifiers set to 6, and 3 respectively to the plane before the Displace modifier I used to convert the height maps from Gaea to poly models. You can actually export obj files directly from Gaea, but they are even more detailed. I'm trying hard to cut down on the detail enough for the mountains to look more like mountains than big piles of rocks.
I'm quite pleased that my new system seems to be ok with all these 13.6 mil poly mountains just lying around in one file. Makes things a lot easier than having to do a separate file for each one. Here is my mountain factory.
[Image_13893]
The mountains shown in the CC3 screen shots are renders of 3D models - ordinary bitmaps rendered from Blender, so there's no difference between one of these and any other mountain symbol. The 3D effect is no more than an illusion once they are in CC3.
Comments
The shadows - are they rendered in Blender or with help of PF Angle Maps in CC3+?
/André
Thank you!
The mountains are generated in an app called Gaea, which for the purposes of this project can be the free 'community' version, since you don't need the ultra high resolution reserved for the purchased version. 1K is enough for a tiny CC3 symbol, and possibly slightly too much but you can't export height maps in any lower res than that, even in the community version. Surprisingly, even the free community version allows the artist to have commercial rights over their work, so you can use your work for profit if you wish. For this reason I have purchased the cheapest Indie version of the app as a sort of 'thank you' to Quadspinner for these generous terms.
And that's what it does. It uses fractal and colour nodes and their associate modifiers to generate heightmaps and colour maps. The 3D view is not currently exportable, and even if it was there is no isometric view. Only top down and true perspective. Here is a section of a screen shot showing Mountain 01
[Image_13877]
Having created the right kind of mountain with all its erosion and snow, to get the isometric projection I then have to import the heightmaps to Blender and use a displacement modifier on a plane to translate the heightmap into a 3D model. Then I use the exported colour maps from Gaea to create a blender material for it. There are 3 textures in the material used on the mountain. The first is a Blend that causes the base of the plane to blend out to transparency at the base of the mountain so I don't have to mess around forever trying to get it right by hand. The second is the colour map that gives the rock and snow its basic colour, and the third is a mask to make the snow shine while keeping the rock relatively matt.
[Image_13878]
Those black dashed lines you can see in the Blender screen shot (second image) are the lights. There are 6 of them, since I prefer to use Blender Render rather than Cycles (which drinks too much processor power for such a tiny job). One on the left is the true 'sun', while the other 5 are very dim bluish white backlighting lights to bring the shadow side of the model up from pitch back to an indirect lighting effect - blueish atmospheric light. I use lights like on a theatre stage instead of blender's indirect lighting or atmospheric tools because I have a lot more control over exactly what is lit, by how much, and what colour it is. It's not terribly easy if you haven't done it many times before over the years, so an alternative to my stage lighting scenario is to use Indirect lighting in the World settings. The disadvantage of doing that is that the indirect light cannot be tinted any particular colour unless you mess with the sky and atmosphere settings, and that's where it gets about a thousand times more complicated than just using an array of stage lights.
The Blender part is the only complicated bit, but that's where all the useless stuff in my head comes into play. I've been using Blender since the very beginning. That must be about 15-20 years ago now, so I know all the hacks right back to the beginning. I'm not so hot with the modern stuff - the Cycles Render machine is beyond me. I don't like it because it feels unnecessarily complicated and the lighting effects in Cycles are ludicrously bad. I really don't know why they bothered when the original Blender engine is so much better and runs about 5x as fast.
They have a photorealistic quality that makes them very different than anything we have currently for overland maps. Personally, I would love to see a set like this that uses the top down approach to mountains and trees.
Over on the FB page they are proving to be a lot more popular than I thought they would. I made the mistake of assuming that because most other sets are ink and wash, beautifully drawn, then everyone would absolutely hate this idea!
Things will move very slowly from now on because I'm due to start a new job soon, but I will go down this direction for a while yet to see what happens.
I agree on the detail front. Maybe this is more of a small regional map style done this way. If it works, though, I will be looking at the possibility of using the same fills and symbols but simplifying them by hand working them in Krita to make a style more appropriate to a world map, for instance.
I think it would be interesting to have a range of scale options in this style - Overland isometric, Overland plan view, and both of those with large, medium and small scale options.
Its not so awesome, really. An awful lot of graphics apps I already have use nodes like Gaea. Vue, Genetica and Blender Cycles (I actually really hate Cycles!) all use node graphs to make things happen, so learning Gaea was relatively simple and more a case of experimenting. Its a bit like having a shiny brand new Lego set. You keep plugging these little bricks together and asking questions when they don't have the desired result, plugging them back together in the slightly different order recommended by other users, and eventually you get it right.
This is the node graph responsible for generating the regular, snow capped and arctic versions of mountain 01. It looks frightening, but the business end of it is actually the single thread part where the mountain is created and shaped. All that mess on the right is just sorting out different colours and masks. Its more about playing with stuff than knowing a lot.
thank you for your explanation - I see, I still have much to learn!
It is great that you are testing many applications and share both results and limitations of them with us.
This leads often to new inspiration - what can be done with those applications and what probably not!
Thank you!
(and honestly I must admit that I still not comfortable with "optimal" lightning settings in 3D programs - where to put my lightning sources to get the most out of my renders...)
Blender has gotten more easily after the 2.8 update - but its almost unlimited possibilities of settings make me crazy at times...
/André
Too many settings in an app makes life unnecessarily complex, which is why I tend to ignore the new options and just carry on with my good old fashioned stage lighting and Blender Render machine. Being selectively blind makes the spacecraft-type GUI far less frightening. I know the controls I use and that's all I need.
But I am beginning to wonder if I'm going just a little bit overboard with this idea. If I have 30 mountains, then I would end up with 120 if I do 4 different versions of each. Maybe only 3 are really needed, and I can get rid of the green one that hasn't got any snow on it?
I'm also thinking that I may need to simplify them all so that they don't vanish into a mass of details as you zoom out again.
I think the green one should be eroded more than its sisters. It just looks like it should be older...and shorter.
My favorite one is the snow covered one, because it looks blended to me.
As far as the tool tree you showed, it looks like a database or system diagram. I can do them, but they hurt.
I agree with Monson; they could each be a map by themselves. Somewhere it my file there are topographic maps of both Everest and the Grand Canyon.
I may dumb down the details quite a lot as things progress. These are almost just too much.
I've been toying with the idea of painting over them to create simplified mountains, like in the background of an oil painting.
Seriously, I think you wouldn't need more than 10-15 mountains in each set. Mike Schley's overland set contains 4 large mountains, and 9 smaller mountains for example. So with 10 and 4 sets, you finish up with 40, perhaps an easier number. 15=60.
Time limitations, Quenten, now that I have what normal people call 'a proper job' for the first time in 4 years
I tried to cash in on my imagination and artistic skills but it didn't work because I can't work fast enough to make it pay, so now I have a regular night job in a supermarket. This will slow me down quite considerably. The quality will be the same. It's just the quantity that will drop off quite a bit
I think it will look better if I dumb down the speckliness of that mountain grass textures. Those green mountains are disappearing in a snowstorm of dots.
Farsight - Thank you! 13.6 million polys per mountain. It ended up that way because I used two separate Subivision Surface modifiers set to 6, and 3 respectively to the plane before the Displace modifier I used to convert the height maps from Gaea to poly models. You can actually export obj files directly from Gaea, but they are even more detailed. I'm trying hard to cut down on the detail enough for the mountains to look more like mountains than big piles of rocks.
I'm quite pleased that my new system seems to be ok with all these 13.6 mil poly mountains just lying around in one file. Makes things a lot easier than having to do a separate file for each one. Here is my mountain factory.
[Image_13893]
The mountains shown in the CC3 screen shots are renders of 3D models - ordinary bitmaps rendered from Blender, so there's no difference between one of these and any other mountain symbol. The 3D effect is no more than an illusion once they are in CC3.
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