River and bank testing GV micro terrain.

[bustr]

Curiosity makes for more work.

Capstone mountain ranges of sandstone weather faster than harder rock and break apart easier as large formations crumble under their own weight. I decided I needed to break the mountain range cap rock even more.

[bustr]

There is a very handy tool called a Catmul smoothing tool. It slowly changes sharp edges into rounded off edges and takes deep cuts and pulls them up slowly into rounded off shallow troughs. This allows you to cut the dog puckky out of a mountain face, then morph it into gentle ridges and canyons. If you morph to flat, just run a cutting tool back between the ridges to redefine the canyons. Then quickly run the Catmul tool on it to blend the new cuts into the surrounding structures.

Here is an example of cutting the dog puckky out of a face.





A first run of the Catmul tool.





Cutting back in the canyons, little more Catmul and some shaping of the tops.





Finished painting after some tweaking of the top shape towards the cap rock disappearing in the next segment in the mountain line.





Nibble away a little every day, a terrain shows up just like that..............

[Arlo]

Your patience and attention to detail are better than mine. 

[bustr]

Man did I get tired of that mountain range. Now I have a clean slate for the third rift valley boarder between two countries.

[bustr]

I hate blank slates and I hate this third one, it's just me upping the creative anti on myself. It has to be randomly different than the first two. So once more into the doodle realm as I push bits and pieces around hoping for an idea that fits this project's theme.

You should really give it a go, just like banging your head on a wall hoping you can do something to make it stop....

[bustr]

The great rift valley in east africa is home to many ginormous volcano's. I can drop a few up in that corner.....


Caldera is 20,000ft, the bulldozer tool and Catmul smoother makes shaping this easy becasue of the scale.

[bustr]

Now I have something that locks down that corner to work out from.

[bustr]

Even big volcano's need loving and rift valley's are full of them.

[bustr]

Using a mile wide brush and the bulldozer tool you can pull a series of overlapping ramps and build a quick mountain range with a lot of random features that will help in the next phase of cutting this into a finished mountain range.

[JimmyC]

I love your intensity to detail and salute your commitment,and look forward to enjoying your hard work.
I just had an idea that as this micro terrain is so labor intensive, as map making in general, would it ever work to have a map with many contributors, all working on smaller areas,then all joined up at the end by the master map maker..a patch work quilt of a map if you like.
There would be much variety and difference and maybe a faster way to create maps? 
just spitballing
<S>

[bustr]

I'm not into map creation with multiple contributors, I like building these things alone, and the terrain editor makes all this moot. It does not allow for shared work space of a single project. Maybe you can wishlist Hitech to add that ability to the terrain editor, then I want to see how you get a terrain finished with all the ego's in this game.

I have a general idea of what I want to do by the time I create my 1:1 blueprint file that I create the heightmap file from. Then after that, it's Michelangelo time as I don't have a clue what the actual details will be at any single place creating the MACRO terrain until they magically appear. Just a guiding theme concept, and the key locations mapped for all field placement.

Once I'm done with the MACRO terrain then why do I want to farm out the fun part I've been slaving all that time to get to? That is when a terrain gets really fun when I'm creating and testing the individual MICRO terrains for the local combat around feilds. In the end I'm still stuck having to check every square mile of 625,000 square miles to account for all the boo boos and problems. So why would I want to inherit additional problems from people who just want the fun of doing bit pieces and make me have to inspect all their work to fit into my plan? Consider that is what Hitech relatively has to do to sign off on my terrain once I submit it to him.

It's easier if I just build my terrain from soup to bowl. If you have some pet concepts or ideas you are just dieing to try out in the MA, build your own terrain. I think I've left a wealth of documentation to look at from my first two terrains and now this one. Seems another player asked me this same question, I think when I was building my first terrain. All he wanted was to do little things like micro combat areas for tank combat and other fun stuff. The MACRO work really can't be farmed out because it is unique to the vision of the terrain creator.

You would know that if you build a terrain.

[bustr]

In the time it took me to write that last reply I finished the foundation for the mountain ridge line on the other side of the rift. I'm getting very fast at doing the roughing in and making 80% complete, ready for finish shaping and painting. With an application like the terrain editor, 15 months of constant creating projects is about what it takes to get as fast as I am now and able to free hand on the fly with it.

[bustr]

After two terrains and two rift valleys on this current terrain, I can plan how I lay down the foundation buildup of a mountain range or some feature and have up to 80% of it finished so the touch-up time to the final form is minimal. Not sure how I could farm that out even if the terrain editor was a sharable work-space for collaboration. I would not end up with my terrain.

I really wish you guys would stop trying to find a way to inject yourselves into my terrains. Please just build your own. Collaborate a consensus committee and pick one of you to be the remote hands on laborer who has the time or inclination to go through this process. Then the consensus committee can get all their cherished dreams of AH gamey utopia implemented, or some such nonsense like that. And then you will stop hurting your own feelings by bothering me.


Here is the 30 minutes of clean up for one side of this first mountain range at this new rift valley.

[Ciaphas]

I really wish you guys would stop trying to find a way to inject yourselves into my terrains. Please just build your own. Collaborate a consensus committee and pick one of you to be the remote hands on laborer who has the time or inclination to go through this process. Then the consensus committee can get all their cherished dreams of AH gamey utopia implemented, or some such nonsense like that. And then you will stop hurting your own feelings by bothering me.

Why are you always so smug? Somebody asks a harmless question and you berate them and anyone else who is interested.

Get over yourself man.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bustr]

You seem to have issues that you can't leave this alone and just watch, you tried to inject your personal wants into this process months before I was at any kind of a micro terrain building point. What drove you to do that without making any attempt to find out if I was even interested before injecting your wants into the screen shot building post? Were you going to build your own terrain at that point?

The last poster and others over that last two terrains I've completed try to inject themselves into the outcome of my terrains. I have clearly explained this is a Michelangelo style of terrain building and to a previous person answered that this work cannot be parceled out. Seems he just didn't want to invest the real time it takes to build an MA terrain and wanted small easy things to quickly do.

Smug, no, I am building my terrains while showing how to do it so others can build their own. Since I started doing it that way with my first terrain BowlMA, people have been trying to inject themselves into my process and have me use their ideas instead of building their own terrains. They tried by forum peer pressure, then by trying to get Hitech to force their changes to my terrains visa the wish list. Or by continually starting arguments over personal things in the middle of my posts. You have ideas about how GV spawns should be arranged in the MA, build a terrain and submit it to Hitech for inclusion.

Back to terrain building.

Finished the starting mountain spines at the root of the rift. I'll have to develop the north side of the ranges more before returning to paint this.





Creating a 4096x4096 map allows for a more detailed screen capture.