Mediterranean Tile Set Testing and Topo Testing.

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Saving myself weeks of sculpting by creating topo layers for my heightmap file. Since the field placements key off the water ways, it doesn't matter what I have to do to blend and form the higher elevations into these basin and low land elevations. After I convert all of these layers, 5000, 3000, 2000, 1000, 500, 100, 50, 25 feet to 16bit grayscale, I just merge all layers and I have a topo map to convert into a heightmap file.

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And now I have all my basic elevations with feilds mapped so I can convert to a heightmap and sculpt the rest.

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The terrain is called riftval and the elevations have tile painting so I can see the elevation demarcations. The import defaulted my 1\2 mile wide streams to 2 miles wide. So I have some fill to do. I raised a 12k boarder around the outside of the CBM porthole. That is what the shadow is on the south edge of the CBM.

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This looks better so I know where my elevation lines are as I shrink the width on the waterways for bridge objects and start laying out the rift valley upthrusts and the highlands. I need to look at some more aerial photos of the highlands surrounding the rift valley in East Africa to come up with a plan to paint deep cracks and canyons along with shallow runoff erosions that are dry most of the year. I can simply paint this onto the CBM bitmap then transfer with a clutter tile brush to use for elevation carving.


 

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Picked up some creep for field placement but, now is the time to adjust for that. This is why a 1:1 blueprint is so handy. And I trimmed 4 miles of the outer edge of the 12,000ft border for the terrain that sits just outside of the CBM porthole.

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Centering the field dot with the red location square all the way down to the surface, I use a 6mile diameter brush at 25ft and start adjusting. I'll have to lay down a port at each location and adjust the land for them. I narrowed down all the streams that a field will sit on and have bridges to a 1\4mile width. Doing the shore line finishing on those is a gigantic bite. Also I can never run the shore tool on this terrain or it will eliminate all the streams. But, you get a better random effect creating the shores by hand. Just set the raise hill tool to 1 and use a wide brush. It's a toss up using raise a hill or shift to cut 1ft\sec. You have to be really quick doing raise a hill to create a shore line or you can end up with a large sand berm.

I will have a lot of stream segments to shift 2miles away from the 1x1 square some of those dots will occupy as place holders during the terrain construction phase.

 

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Now the land creep from the import has been cleaned up. I was right, the feilds along the streams, I'll have to move a segment of each stream to center the stream 2 miles from the field. The land on each side of every stream is 25ft, I've got to taper that down while keeping about 1\4 mile wide stream. Now that we have one off bridges that work, we need a tool that will adjust the shores of streams to accommodate the bridges. I suspect some how I could use the shore segment creation tool, I guess I could experiment.

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Now I get to build the first of three rift valleys, things like this for the first country are always a PITA. You have got to love the bulldozer tool for blending elevations, pulling long elevations of land blocks, cutting canyons\valleys\cracks, and trimming up long straight lines.

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It's amazing what you can do with a few thousand vertical feet of wall, the bulldozer and smoothing tool. Not sure how this will play out when the wall is only 500-1000ft.

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I think I've got my technique for creating the wall effects for the main rift crack. About an hour of work randomizing the faces out to the wider spreading valley. Still need to come up with something to do with the large areas of 5k highland.

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Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My head hurts.

Building mountains is easy, it's the logical transitions of why and how geological features relate to each other. Then there is the strata in the walls I want to show through because of the nature of the upthrust zones on the sides of rifts. I've gotten my steps down to about 400ft, I'm working on getting at least 200ft if possible to be more visually convincing. This is like doodling with clay on a table until a good looking accident pops up. Gurgelsnort, fifferdoodle, razinfratsin, frikking, klingon burpping froglings doodlesnort......

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Still trying out different techniques with the bulldozer tool to come up with a look for the rift walls. And how to transition down from the 12k terrain border wall and back in country from the rift through all the uplift ridges that eventually drop down into the runoff bowls. You can see in a few screen shots I used the bulldozer with a broad brush to wipe out and level a bunch of work that became to busy looking with no real sense of a transition to lower elevations. Mommas don't let your children grow up to make terrains......


I'm working in the left hand rift next to the edge of the map to come up with the look and techniques to apply on the two other rift valleys. Those mile wide long cuts running in from the edges of the map are the runoff base of the highland slopes on each side of them. I'm trying to keep the highlands to 5k with a 12k wall border just outside of 2048x2048 that will blend down into the 5k highlands.




One of the stepped fracture wall techniques I've been working on using the bulldozer tool. You can see on the left all the foundation terrain blocks I think will be the upthrust range. I'm still making changes on the fly even to those. You keep making changes and wiping out hours of work when it's just wrong until that eureka moment happens.

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Along here in the next set of screen shots you will see the wide flat area above the runoff canyons where I used the bulldozer tool to wipe out a couple of days of work that was going nowhere. At the end of the rift crack I need to change that rounded end into a longer narrow crack.

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Think I'm starting to get a handle on this style of terrain.

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I went ahead and finished the back side of the hidden border wall because the 8mile top width was throwing off my perspective as I tried to transition down from the edge into the map. This corner area with a rift and the highlands running down to the water basin is where I'm developing the look for the rest of the terrain along with the techniques to shape the rest of the map. I've repeatedly erased hours of work in this spot because the look I want was going no where.

Back side of the border wall finished.




Now my problem is transitioning the rift range into the highlands with it all transitioning logically.




I've run lines to show the ridge or outline a high area to leave in place and develop logical topographical features out of it.