Setting the Water II

Right lets get to it shall we, this week we start a more in depth run at terraforming from a hand drawn map. This time round the region is 14x10 large tiles in a landscape configuration so the greyscale image has to be (56,40)×64+x+y=(3585,2561).

Now crop your photographed map and expand the correct portion to fill the canvas.

Next I lassoed and deleted any unnecessary text & drawings in the water areas of the map; this makes it easier to see for future stages.

Start tracing in a narrow black brush all coastlines and water bodies, do this on a separate layer. This is also your last opportunity to make any significant changes to the map without making things much more difficult later on. As you can see I edited the river mouth on the right hand side of the image.

Once you are happy, create a new plain black layer and sandwich it between your trace and your photo layers. Then invert the colours of the trace layer.

Go back to the photographic layer by making the plain black (greyscale) layer invisible; next trace any major contour boundaries you feel like. I chose two more, the bottom of the treeline for Meadowshire tree controller, & the snowline. For reference, shoreline is at RGB 12, treeline at RGB32-RGB35, snowline at RGB54-RGB57.

In theory if all your lines are continuous and run to the edge of the map, you should be able to use the magic wand tool to select all the areas that will be at shoreline to treeline altitude in your trace layer. Swap to your greyscale layer and bucket fill RGB12.

Rinse and repeat for the other contours until you have what looks like a very basic cell shaded map on your greyscale layer.

Save the whole collection of layers as “[name of region] working map”; then delete all but the greyscale layer. Flatten the image so the layer becomes background, finally please check that the file is a 16bit greyscale, save as a copy, a PNG file named “[name of region] test one”. Do not save changes to original file when exiting photoshop, otherwise you will lose the other two layers which are still handy for reference.

If you want, at this stage you can boot up the mapper and create a region from your current test file. This is not the exact method I used in the first region, this is a more streamlined version I hope. My result in the mapper shows considerable noise, this is from chopping and changing between the best options for import into the mapper.

Well as you can see all the various elements are there. In a few updates time we will come back and look at some detailing techniques. Next time we are going to be looking at steampunk as a genre, and the stylistic direction I wish to take the regions architecture in (i.e. what plugins I will be picking). Finally as per requirement we have the fundamentally key teaser image, this is one of my favourites so far. Enjoy.

Anyway, I hope this has shown that going from hand drawn map to sc4 map is not quite as impossible as it first looks. See you soon.