Yeah, that's a little silly in terms of coloring. Saving out several channels for different elements will allow final assembly in Photoshop. Because we're going to do things in a perspective mode, everything will be screenshots of Wilbur's 3D preview window, which is a little lower resolution than is ideal. I really ought to get a higher-resolution monitor one of these years or fix Wilbur to generate a larger image directly.
A bump map because it's often useful to bring drama from low to high.
A texture-shaded image because it gives a little interest to the high-frequency parts of the terrain (the edges).
A base color image is important to avoid a general black-and-white map. This is from the Wilbur V2 shader, adjusted to look like a forest / desert kind of terrain.
Most folks are familiar with a simple shaded image, so we'll put one of those onto the stack as well.
Wilbur supports a depth image, which can be used to get heavier strokes on depth discontinuities. After a little processing the raw depth image looks like this:
Might as well do contours and rivers as additional interest.
That's the parts. Most of the grayscale things will be multiplied together as the high-frequency detail on the image, which will be modulated with the background color to get the overall image.
Last edited by waldronate; 12-05-2022 at 09:31 AM.
Dropping everything into photoshop and stacking them up gives this result:
The top items are mostly multiplied together. The river layer had the background selected and removed, then a color overlay / outer glow layer effect applied to make things the right color and improve visibility. The contours and bump layers were color-inverted to allow for cleaner multiplication without damaging everything (that is, without going completely black). The two brightness/contrast adjustments offset the crazy amount of darkening from the large number of stacked grayscale images. Some layers are at much less than 100% opacity (bump and contours would totally overwhelm things if not reduced).
Last edited by waldronate; 12-05-2022 at 09:32 AM.
Last edited by waldronate; 12-05-2022 at 09:33 AM.
Labels are the hard part, but they are important for being a map and not just being a picture.
### Latest WIP ###
It still needs some more frills like maybe a wind rose, scale bar (maybe - it's hard to do in a meaningful way with a perspective map), and some descriptive text about this national park's history and importance.
We'll see if I get any time to come back to this.
I really like that!! Ah, if only I could learn Wilbur...
Really like the coloring and texture, and the perspective is solid. You may have a contender here!
Wilbur's easy. At least if you have a specific kind of twisty and mechanistic mindset, anyhow.