Making maps with Gaea

[Turambar]

Since posting a brief tutorial on how I made the heightmap for my April-May Lite Challenge map, I have been continuing to experiment with Gaea, trying perfect its use for heightmaps. Rather than continuing to post on the tutorial thread, it seemed more appropriate to start a thread in this forum where I can document my progress. If others are working with Gaea, feel free to post here as well.

I have been continuing to experiment using randomly generated continent and region shapes as masks, using Gaea's File node. To prepare a shape to be a mask, just make sure it is 1) on a square canvas, and 2) has sharp edges (its probably easiest to keep it in two colors - I just used Posterize on GIMP to clean up the shape. Here's my latest effort:


1. Original shape file

Randomly generated from Asgars generator.




2. Final Heightmap

Based on some tips which I came across, I made a few changes in my workflow to achieve this heightmap (you can see my original two attempts on the Tutorial thread here). The first is that I used an inverted Apex node to create more contrast between mountains and flat areas. The second is that I used a series of masks capturing a spectrum of different heights to add more noise and variation to landscape.

I also used a swirl node, to give the continent a bit more interesting shape than the original generated continent.



3. Texturing

For fun, I did some basic texturing withing Gaea. I will be honest, I am brand new at this aspect, so this is pretty rudimentary.






If anyone wants the original Gaea file to see what I did, let me know. For some reason the forum won't let me upload the file directly here.