Cloud City (final name TBD!)

[Caenwyr]

Hey all! So I'm currently on a train taking me from Frankfurt, Germany back to Brussels, Belgium. My train is terribly delayed. These past few hours I've seen a few pretty dark sides of humanity that I wont bore you with. Luckily I had my trusty old mapping laptop with me so I went completely wild on a new map. This time I started from a beautiful clunky cloud I had photographed a few months back and has been laying dormant (but not forgotten!) until now.

The image below is not the original - I tweaked it a bit to make a more secluded bay - but all of the elements come from the same image. There's some rather obvious cloning artefacts but don't worry about those, I'll only be using (i) the layout and (ii) the darkest parts of the image for the bump shading of the ocean floor.



OK. With this said, I went ahead and drew in the coastlines.


Initially I wanted to go for a mostly handdrawn style, but then I discovered just how delicate and detailed the texture of the ocean (the semi-clouded sky) really was. So! I decided to hand-create the terrain for the landmasses, pulled it through Wilbur and combined it with a greyscale version of the sky image to create a bump map.


A few tweaks, a little toying with Lighting Effects and some self-made gradients later and this is the current result:


And now, the real task begins: Now I need to start adding a city! Or several? I'm not even sure in which style I'm gonna do it, or even in which time the place is gonna be based! All of that is for a next update.