This project started as working on getting more realistic mountain into foothill into plains transitions. That experiment worked out so well I decided to also attempt some new texturing techniques I wanted to try. Those texturing techniques works out well enough that I decided to try a new (for me) thing and make some farmland patches in the low lying areas. That was where everything going well started to break down a bit, so here’s my stopping point for today.
Methodology for the farmland right now involves heavy use of the Crystallize device at multiple scales, which seems to work really well for getting different patch sizes and proportions, and using a Slope Selection with a pixel level square Expander gets me the nice borders between different plots. I want to work on getting a bit more control over the plot map to make it look less like something from Piet Mondrian and more like actual farmland plots.
I was about to make the joke *Mondriaan entered the chat*.
I looks cool, though I think the gradient for terrain can be more interesting. Also, those rivers are really, really thick, breaking the immersion for me a bit. Is there a reason the farmlands are (from what it looks like) totally flat? And instead of square plots, you could use a Voronoi distirubtion, for a more old school plotting of the land!
For sure! The thing I was trying there was simply using the Probability device to drive some aspects of the texturing to more naturally distribute layers. I haven’t played around with that device very much, so I was less concerned with the final output and was instead just seeing what I could expect from it!
You’re not wrong, I’m definitely struggling with scale on this one! I personally like fat rivers (living in a place with really fat rivers), but even I think it’s too much! I wonder if I should scale down the river, or scale up the plots of land for the farms to change the scale of the whole scene?
From a scene/story/world building perspective, no there’s no reason ahaha! They’re mostly flat right now because I was having a hard time getting the texture of the farmlands just right while it was being distorted by the underlying terrain. It’s just flattened out with a Curves device, because the intention was to bring back some of the variation, but I ended up actually really liking how it looked flat.
Definitely gonna keep this idea in my back pocket for the next time I’m using WM to make a map for a D&D campaign, that’s brilliant! Thanks!
Thanks! Unfortunately, with these more experimental projects that I do occasionally, I don’t tend to actually save a project file unless I make something really cool. In this case, since I was mostly just testing out some new ideas for texturing, it didn’t really make the cut.
If there’s something specific you’re trying to learn from it though, you can ask and I’ll do my best to recreate that part!
If you’re talking about the borders between the different plots, that’s actually pretty simple! I just used the “Borders” output of the Crystallize device, and combined them using the same mask that I used for the combiners on the actual textures, then add a Select Slope device set to only 90 degree slopes on the mask, and add those borders to the output of the previous combiner. Here’s a very simple project file demonstrating it, if it helps!
