Even when you're working with external programs and editors, all the planning and deciding where what is going to be can become quite tedious... Okay, I'm bullshitting you, I just wanted to share this because it's weird. Using the bread and butter of any terraformer who likes at least some realism - WorldMachine (paid, shitty tiny resolution free version available) and WorldPainter (free) and also Eihort (free) to render our results quicker and further than in-game and Photoshop (paid, but a free program called Gimp can be used as an alternative) we are going to create a terrain out of a picture, how much resemblance to the original image is left at the end is for you to decide.
- First, find yourelf a completely normal picture.
- In your image editing software of choice, turn saturation all the way down and fuck around with the brightness/contrast sliders until you get an image which has a lot of contrasting very dark and very light parts, somewhat similar to this:
- Save the picture as a .png
- Open up WorldMachine. Put down a file input and find your edited black and white image. You may want to scale it way the fuck up to make the map bigger and then just fit the extents to it.
- The imported image
- Now, put it through a clamp configured to a height you think looks nice and keeps enough detail in the picture. You may also want to put it through an inverter like I did. This is what it looks like after an inverter and a clamp:
The finished product looks like this:
- Now put it into an advanced perlin and then erosion.
So, all that's left is get all the different outputs and get it into WorldPainter. A resolution I like is x2048.
- In WorldPainter, press CTRL-M and select your main output. Use whatever settings you prefer for this.
- If you happen to be as stupid as me and not allow non-square extents in World Machine, you too cut off the unnecessary tiles. This is how it looks from the side now:
- Add all the stone layers. Optionally, you can add grass or podzol over them using masks. I will probably make a post about that in this very blog.
- Scream.
- This map has many flaws, especially around the text where there is a 90 degree cliff face but that is not what matters. What matters is this:
- If you want, you can add things like trees, plants, rocks or rivers on your map but I care not for that shit so I just export and go straight to Eihort. Here are some screenshots from that. I apologize ahead for a weird bug with the biome textures becoming transparent which happens to Eihort. I can't be bothered to edit it all.
