Mediterranean Tile Set Testing and Topo Testing.

[bustr]

More screen shots of the canyon wall or strat buttress cliffs.


Creating a down slope runoff transition in strata shelves rather than just shaping a giant water run off and talus slope.




Ground level view with trees for scale.






How it looks from the air at about 30,000ft. Painting all of this to look somewhat realistic in response to the topographical features is often as much of a bite as creating them in the first place. I may run some more shelves and cliffs down farther to transition into the 5,000ft area in the lower left corner as a canyon. Means taking those initial water cuts in the cliffs and logically extending them down as the start of smaller canyons. Wooof!!!!,,,this is a never ending story. I need to take some time to test the path tool river creation function and see how those turn out. I can already see two obvious feeder streams that I can run by two airfields in that valley and place the town on one side with bridges to cross.

[bustr]

Tinkering with something you just built because you have an idea is a two edged sword, and you might end up scrubbing a whole area of work you just spent a week or so on.


It occurred to me that I have to run a transition from the 12,000ft border around the map down into the 5,000ft highland in the back 1\3 of every country. So I just spent two days working on stepp terraced cliffs. The tops of those cliffs I slightly rounded and left at that which cut out a block of time detailing the tops of those features. Since I'm creating a canyon land out of that 1\3 of each country which is 5,000ft high, I don't need to work so hard on complicated high to low elevation features like I cut the foundations in weeks ago. So I flattened all of those back to 5,000ft which blends nicely into the stepp terraced cliffs and gives me a transition into a runoff valley described by the rift valley mountain range meeting the 5,000ft highland. Dangit....I got so busy with this once again I forgot to test the river tool. Once you cut those cliff faces you can use the bulldozer tool to nudge around short distances to gradually weather down the face. The bi-liniar smoothing tool will suddenly slump a whole area or not target small areas like you want it to. It's better for large scale smoothing. The bulldozer tool set to the smallest brush and pulled in short motions will nudge small areas into shape that are easier to recover from if you nudge too far.

Building a terrain from scratch with a lot of topo detail is simple as long as you ask yourself where does the water go and follow that path as you sculpt.





Filled back in......

[bustr]

I was cleaning up the topography for the first rift valley and completing painting the mountains. This pressure crack is 4,000ft deep and maybe 1\4 mile at it's widest at the bottom. It's also a prototype for the canyon land system I will be putting into each country to use up the 5,000ft high backfield and have logical sources for the streams and rivers.

[bustr]

There is always something that holds you up creating the look of a terrain. Transitions in topography can be tough when you are trying to find a plausible feature. Then like playing solitaire, one or two cards flipped up and the game falls into place. It's funny how most of the topographical features I create show up in nature specials I watch just around the time I'm stumped for a plausible feature.

[bustr]

I was stuck on how to transition that dog leg on the north side of the rift when I remembered rift valleys are tectonic plates pulling apart which creates volcanoes. Many of them are classic cinder cones covered in trees and grass. I swear sometimes these terrains blurr into creating the world for an anime movie.

[bustr]

It's a start....

[bustr]

The cinder cone in these screen shots is 7,000ft and 6miles across at the base. That is big enough that the smallest brush with the bulldozer tool will let you pull scale runoff canyons. But, once painted a second color, they look too big for the scale. Smoothing the run off canyons a bit and painting the cone one color, the graphics engine will generate shadows that suggest runoff canyons and the cone will look to scale.

The illusion with this terrain to present a 3D virtual world is the same illusion you accept to watch an anime movie. Except in the is case you get to be one of the actors because it's a game. A good anime movie will present terrain and other scenes back grounds with a certain amount of balance and scale that fits the theme. With the anime the writer sets you up with a story line so you are brought along with expectations that the anime artists try to produce in the 3D media of the film. With Aces High, inside of the polygon limitations you try to present enough of an illusion that it takes advantage of the graphics engine to present something the player's brain wants to accept as part of the fantasy called the game.

[Drano]

Looks good, Bustr! Thanks for taking the time to figure that editor out. Was beyond me!

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

[bustr]

My wife studied art in college and graduated with a degree allowing her to teach art in primary education for awhile. She also sold her own art when she was in college. I've reached the point where I have to ask her about color relationships, perspective, and light where the human eye is concerned. Once I realized the size of the polygons in the mesh everything is constructed from will make everything turn out about the same no matter how you worry and slave over ever foot of anything. Construction got simple.

What is complicated and always screws you over unless you set hard rules on elevations is scale. Then how you paint so the eye sees what it expects to see. After that the player is agreeing to be in a fantasy world and if his eye is given the right fantasy, his brain will do the rest.

What you see inside of the terrain editor will not look like what you see in the game offline once you spawn out a tank. Geo features under a certain size cannot be made very granular and beautiful so the mistake everyone makes is to ignore scale and keep massaging the micro feature into a gigantic mistake. Offline that looks good but ultimately is too huge based on the arena world scale. The secret is to learn how to manage the small close up ugly features that even look ugly after you import a geomap into ARTIK's program if you happen to get up reallllyyy close to some small canyon by mistake.

These two pictures are good example of managing scale and painting. The first caldera just looks wrong, the second one, your brain keeps helping it to look better because it's closer to things you have seen in real life. Art in the terrain editor is a lot like Zen brush painting where you show a minimum of strokes that perfectly engage the brain to fill in the rest. Otherwise, the terrain editor is a clunky beast when you create things smaller than than 1\4 mile. So you create illusions....... I think I figured out what I want to do with that mesa ramp in the previous post, it looks orphaned and wrong in it's current configuration. So does it's terminus at the volcano.

This is a never ending create it, destroy part of it and go in a direction you didn't think of a day ago. I saw a caldera last night researching rift valley volcanoes that has a second lower caldera that created a large lava flow field, think that is how I'll make sense out of those structures to the left of the cone. I also spend a lot of time online looking at photos of the geo features I'm themeing my terrain around, then fighting with the polygon mesh to bring them into the arena. All of that before I create the bases and spawns and all those things players need to get onto the map.

You guys deserve better if it's possible since Hitech went to the trouble to upgrade the game to allow art work like this.


 


 

[bustr]

Once you figure out where to put the foundation for a topo feature and then make all the large scale cuts into it. The bulldozer tool on the smallest brush will move, add, and subtract small areas of the gross feature allowing the polygon mesh to respond by reshaping it into it's most natural response. Versus trying to cut or add everything with the hill tool or the smoothing tool. It's like using two fingers to move clay around to create small features on the surface of a large clump.

The topography for this terrain is turning into building a 1000 piece puzzle by creating several hundred pieces as I go to paint a portrait by that many pieces at a time. I REALLY wish Waffle had added a red brown volcanic rock tile to this tile set.

[bustr]

One of the things that happens while you are busy creating primary topo features is orphans. Leftover topo odds and ends that you ended up with while cutting and shaping. Just next to those volcanoes was one and it created it's own quandary of why would that be there. So I made it look like the volcanoes came up in a pressure ridge orphaning that elevation from the mesa ridge next to it.


You can see the orphan feature just below the volcanoes in light green.





I turned it into this to reflect the mesa ridge it was cut off from.





You can see another orphan with a base square on it to the south I'll have to deal with eventually.

[bustr]

Rather than fight with it and try to pull something out of my hat, I used the Internet to look at volcanoes in the rift valley and found something in Kenya. 500,000 years ago a volcano erupted which spawned the eruption of 200 tiny volcanoes next to it. Great way to fill in that open space next to the large volcano. Many of the volcanoes in the rift valley are covered in greenery. A lot of what I'm creating are from rift valley photos of geo formations no one would believe exist in the real world. I get stumped for a solution, I just search for geo features in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa.








Looks like I'm out of excuses not to start another rift valley..........

[bustr]

Found another set photos for that volcano area in Kenya.

My rendition before.





After...

[bustr]

I just had to keep reading about that volcano in Kenya.....

[bustr]

 


I hate this frikken fraking polymesh grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr r............................ .


This is the bias angle to the cardinals that won't sculpt worth spit because it's a bias off a bias and grump grump crapppppppppppppppppppppppppp ppp.....So I have to manually build with the raise hill tool just to tear down to what I want.