Making a continent

Bug Reports
#1

Hello.

I’ve been trying to create a large terrain (continent size). But i can’t get anything close to good looking? When i’m at that scale everything looks very weird.

Any help?

#2

What version are you using?
and what are your Project settings?

#3

2.3 Free.

I’ve tried with 8x8km and 200x200km and change the max height, to 8km.

#4

Hi there,

Creating vast amounts of realistic terrain that holds together at all scales is one of the biggest challenges in world building. Here are a few tips I can give:

In terms of creating natural looking continent shapes, my preference is to create the continental shapes by hand using a Layout Generator and the polygon shape tool. This will often/usually be adjusted with noise functions, but the highest level shapes in the natural world have very asymmetrical results due to plate tectonics, etc, that don’t look like perlin noise or similar.

For how to do this, I’d recommend going to File->open Example and navigating to \New Examples for 2.3\Scenes\Island with Mountains and Lowlands.tmd.

Here you’ll see a complete scene with two different terrain types being put together. If you unfreeze the preview display and select the layout generator labelled “Island” in the top box, you will see its generating island-type shapes. Create additional overlapping shapes to define a larger continent instead of an island – this is probably the quickest/easiest way to do it.

Note how the current polygon shape has the smooth paths turned on (right-click on the shape and enable the Bezier path), then tug on the various control handles to produce interesting cusps and inlets.

#5

Thanks, this helped!

I’ve got this so far: http://i.imgur.com/tUKXMKC.png

But i would like something more like this for the mountains (the erosion): http://www.world-machine.com/gallery/images/1359399461_RockyMtns.jpg

Anything you can give me some help or tips with?

#6

Assuming you’re using a world like that example file, you will be modifying the chain of devices that in the example was the “mountain” advanced perlin noise generator. The key is that you can in fact put ANYTHING into that spot, which will be combined into your world. I would zoom into (set your render extents to) just the mountain regions so you can focus your efforts there.

So the problem is reduced to simply creating mountain terrain like your example. From looking, there are several things you’ll want to incorporate to get that kind of look:

  1. Multiple rounds of erosion and thermal erosion (ie : generator -> erosion -> thermal erosion -> erosion -> thermal erosion) can produce heavily eroded terrain but smooth sided terrain that looks similar.
  2. The Voronoi noise device can produce/add some scalloped peaks similar to those in the image.
  3. The terracing looks restricted to the colormap in that example, but if not you can add a Terrace device and set the layering and amount to high values.

Creating the above is part of the fun – but browse other example files and posts here to see if you see any mountains that are similar, then open them up and see how they’re constructed.

PS: One last note: You can also develop completely different texturing for your mountains and lowlands areas and combine them with a chooser exactly like was done with the terrain itself.

#7

What about the resolution ? only 513*513? you also need to build it (green button)

#8