AERLAAN – A playground built for a muse

[PaGaN]

Azelor, on closer inspection, you were right. The north polar landmass was JUST touching the north pole with the thinnest of connections closing in the body of water at the north pole.

I changed the outlines to give a broader margin to the land and reduce ambiguity.



and the Polar view



That polar pinching is a real beeyatch! I seriously need to think of a way to work on elevation at the poles. I'm thinking that I may need to work the heightmaps for those areas up in 3d space, expand the texture put to flattened layer and then cut and paste back in. either that or leave the area ambiguously ice covered....hmmmm (rubs chin in contemplation)

PaGaN

[Pixie]

That polar pinching is a real beeyatch! I seriously need to think of a way to work on elevation at the poles.

I'm years into drawing a detailed heightmap.. and I still avoid the polar areas. I honestly and deeply admire the way you plunge in.

For the heightmap, this might be a little too late. Or maybe unnecessary as you've done like that all along, but... are you using separate layers for separate heights? You should.. each height as a solid single-color shape. It's the only way you'll be able to change color scheme in the future, maybe even producing grayscale heightmaps and porting them to wilbur.

[PaGaN]

Hey Pixie!

I'm not working on separate layers but DON'T panic! i got it covered...LOL

I'm actually working in greyscale with a gradient map layer on top (which is super easy to change up, which i do often). I actually spend most of the time wiht the gradient turned off and just flick it on to check the range of elevations i'm at.

At the moment I'm working out the broad areas and getting the regions up to the heights they need to be at and then I will make a more detailed pass to get some nice features that should hopefully translate well for the next step which (you read my mind) will be to take the final greyscale heightmap into Wilbur and then take the Wilbur output into Gimp for the bump map.

I've got to say that I'm really impressed with the bump map filter in Gimp. Unless i've missed something i really don't think Photoshop has anything like that, at least not that easy to generate and manipulate (though i'm by no means an expert in PS, i've probably just not discovered the right filter/tool etc...)

I'm actually really enjoying this phase, it's very erm, relaxing???...LOL. a little bit of land sculpting. My opinion may well change when i have to tackle the poles but i'll cross that bridge when i get to it (soon). I think my plan of working the poles up on a globe and then flattening that material layer out SHOULD work. I figured out that using the lasso tool on a 3d object to define the area you are rendering speeds up the rendering of the strokes A LOT! before that, it was slower than frozen mollasses.

PaGaN