Update VIII - Playing God
Playing God
Here we are, the first totally in game update, still not storytelling by any stretch, however, I will be sharing with you some of the natural development occurring on this somewhat barren terrain. Don’t get too excited it is still only my first attempt at “plop-water” rivers. There is only one picture of my very first attempt and that is below. I tried to follow the contours of the valley and gradually make my way downhill. This didn’t work out to well as I ended up following the grid for a significant portion of the route. I also forgot to put down any form of riverbed first.
Second time round I decided to try to learn from my mistakes and improve my technique. Taking a leaf out of 3RR’s book, I decided to try and pursue realism more vehemently; I used the road and rail tools to smooth out a path for my stream. Note that although this is more realistic than just following the contours, it is nowhere near the realism David achieves as my gradients are far too steep for such a tranquil stream.
My next task was to trace along this route, in a very lazy and haphazard manner. You will need to select an appropriate riverbed texture; I chose Chris Adams’ marsh texture from the RRP. Don’t worry at all about straying off course a little, however, major deviations may lead to uphill streams, so you may need to go back and modify the terrain with the road and rail tools again.
Next, follow your riverbed down the slope roughly again with the plop water tool of your choice; I used Jeronij transparent blue & the half tile size for the upper stream and the whole tile for the wider, lower sections. By minimising the amount of plop-water tiles you use you in fact allow more space for riverside plops such as trees and bushes.
At this stage the visual modifications such as rock, water, beach, terrain, plop water & even the techniques I am using are still very much flexible, so at this stage I will leave this here. A lot of the things I am having to do a large number of times, I have only done once or twice before, so this is all pretty new to me as well. Either way I hope you have enjoyed this little insight into playing god.
This is the same area in region view, at the time of writing this entry. As you can see there is much work to be done. I leave you today with two pictures of meadows that I found knocking around. All of the eye candy shots I keep posting are merely experiments in plop flora. It is all practice though and gradually meadow by meadow this region is coming to life.
See you later
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