Roleplaying
I happened to get a very good price on a new piece of extremely cool software, GeoControl2, an offer I could not refuse and the godfather would have said. To describe it in one sentence, I would say: It’s like a FilterForge for making landscape and mountain formations. And for me who is artistically impaired and cannot draw anything without computerized help (maybe there is a hidden EC fund for us, who knows). Even making good looking mountains in either Bryce which I’ve had since version 2 and now Vue is difficult when you can’t really draw things. I know how you would like it to look, but I fail epically everytime I try to draw something by hand.
So let is scratch the surface of this, there will be many more in depth posts about this later on I think, I’ve found a new baby toy to play with.
First, when you start GeoControl2, you will see a top down view of a randomly generated mountain. You can fiddle with filters and things (I said I will dig deeper into this later, I’m still learning) to craft and shape your mountain.
I fast forward a bit here, and this is the 2D view of my first mountain that didn’t look like crap. (Why cant I just fiddle carefully, but have to tweak everything and try everything until the result is crap, then start over…)
The colors represent heights. You can now see the details of this, it is brilliant. And here is the 3D view of this mountain.
Now I exported this in a Vue .TGA height map format. Vue can read many formats but this was an option so I tried it. Now I started Vue, and created a terrain object, it looks like this in the top view.
I went into edit o the terrain in the terrain editor, and this is how it looks there.
Now I did import image, and selected the new image I just generated in GeoControl2. I set the Proportion to 100% (only the imported image, but you can use this to blend different maps together. I got some ideas for a FilterForge filter to make terrain maps, but GC2 is all that and much more.
When the terrain was loaded it was way to high, something I need to learn to control in GC2, but this is how it looked.
Now I went to the material painting, one of my favorite tools in Vue, that I never got the grip of in Bryce. You add materials and then you give each a color to represent the material, then you paint (which isn’t really my thing as I paint like a lame cow).
But the result looks promising, green and grey goo.
So, how will this turn out? Stay tuned…
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