I gave myself another project for today. This is the second homage to Sergey Kuyden and his Iceland Landscape (World Machine) featured on ArtStation.
Like the last one, the terrain took a bit of push-and-pull to get the right set of features for the texture work I wanted to try. Again, the texturing is somewhat advanced, but not to the degree Sergey’s work shows (see the screenshot of his graphs on the webpage). There are still many things he does that I can’t puzzle out, but I did get results I’m happy with, which counts for a lot. I haven’t gotten around to setting up Daz Studio, so I’m still not finishing up with a proper 3D render. All I can post is screenshots of the WM viewport.
Once again, I’m sharing the file - fiddle 211024 01.tmd (486.2 KB) - for anyone interested in poking through the guts of this one.
When I noticed I was working at about 2K I decided to take the time to render it out at 4K, to see how the details came out. The results aren’t that bad:
If I were to set this up in Daz and put a person into the scene, the resolution would suck and the person would be dwarfed by the “smaller” hills, so it might be a far cry from reality. Still, it was fun to work on!
My main critique, aside of what you’ve mentioned, would be the scale of the hills/roughness of the terrain. The reference terrain is probably quite smooth (even before the erosion applied), and I imagine only a bit of noise on top of the shapes was used. To shape with the Erosion device is something I do not recommend, as it takes away a lot of features. Instead, try using the old Thermal Weathering device.
To get more interesting colouring, I think a lot of the colouring magic comes from the colourisers being used in the reference terrain, so I suggest trying to get some colour palettes based on satellite images, for example from Iceland.
Hope this helps, and looking forward to your next creations!
Shaping with the Erosion device was my best guess at how Sergey was working to get the Flow details he came up with. Are those really the kind of details that Thermal Weathering can bring out in a terrain, and what workflow would you suggest for that?
Also, until I can afford to get an Adobe subscription that includes Substance and Photoshop, I don’t really have the tools to create my own color tables the way I used to. I have used them in the past. For this piece, I used an eyedropper to sample colors from the reference terrain and used them in custom Colorizers (as you probably saw).
The main shaping can be done with the Thermal Weathering, but indeed, those flowlines are from the Erosion device, maybe with some post processing on with the Flow Mask. The workflow would kinda look like this:
So we’re using the Flow Mask from the first Erosion to carve some very (unnatural) channels into the terrain, then use the Thermal Weathering device to give those valley shapes, and after that use a “softer” Erosion to add those smaller channels, which we amplify by using the Flow Mask again to carve them out some extra.
You could of course use MS Paint, or World Machine itself (albeit a bit counterintuitive) to manipulate images and create your own colour maps. The eyedropper method is a good one as well!
I’ve done an experimental run through the setup you presented, and did not get close to your example mountain. It’ll take a while to figure out the right settings for all the filters and combiners. That is where my build is off, I’m sure.
Sadly it was created in the WM alpha, remind me to post it here as soon as the dev release of Artist Point is out, then you’ll be able to access it as well!
Looks beautiful! The problem with any terrain baked at large scale like this, humans won’t be visible bigger than ants comparatively. A better reference of scale would be a small village, a field nearby, or a futuristic airbase, with a spaceship landing or taking off.
That said, would work as a final render if you can get the scale of water right! Good luck!
