Working for Gaea

So welcome back to frantic February. This, the third update of the month, follows on directly from Update VIII, Playing God. As I continue to battle with custom content with the aim to creating an aesthetically pleasing stream. If you remember I said I was looking for an iterative process that would be relatively straightforward to duplicate, as there could well be many of streams in the region. I happened to stumble blindly into the method I’m showing you today. It was all because I was fawning over Cycledogg’s terrain textures.

Well I was thinking that there is a veritable treasure trove of detail and even flora represented in the terrain textures that make up the Meadowshire terrain mod that I am using. I thought why not use that as my guide for the ploppable flora. So I parked the spring of the river right on top of a natural rocky outcrop. Cleared the surrounding tree-controller trees and set about making my barebones water trail a bona fide stream.

In this first image you can see I have used a combination of Pegasus’ plop rocks from his plop stream kit, and some of the maxis rocks re-modded by Chrisadams3997. Around the edges is a smattering of Aubrac rocks from Orange O that are available on the LEX. Notice the various elements of the Meadowshire terrain mod in just this small expanse of land. You have yellow, white, orange & pink flowers, strewn rocks & detritus, scrub bushes and mossy rocks. All of these things we have a corresponding ploppable available.

Using the various ploppables available to me you can see how I have begun to fill in the landscape, matching ploppable to texture as closely as possible for now. I did however notice that Jeronij’s transparent ploppable water sits very high off the ground and that Pegasus’ plop rocks and shoreline pieces don’t sit on top of it. I decided that I should sacrifice the transparency for the sake of river shape and switched over to Pegasus’ water also. It turns out that this water matches my water mod better anyway.

I found that if you are using Ennedi’s HD sandstone brown rock mod like I am, Pegasus’ sand brush helps with cliff blending quite well. This is especially useful considering most of the rocks from the set are very mossy and need some form of interface for them to sit comfortably adjacent to a different rock tone.

As you can see I am just steadily adding bits a small amount at a time. Unfortunately you have to do this and also save often; as when working at this level of detail the fact that the bulldoze tool has to demolish whole tiles can come and bite you hard in the rear. Patiently filling in gaps one by one I begin filling up the open areas, at this altitude you would not have open forest but clumps of trees, with a much larger percentage of bush.

After all the major elements are complete I begin a final pass with the two weed brushes in the rural renewal kit flora, and then the green rye grass. Now obviously you have eyes, if anything looks out of place, you can go back and edit it, but I was pretty happy with the result.

This small area is largely complete now.  The following images show the same technique used with varying degrees of human override. This next pair shows the immediately downstream segment of water that is on a far steeper gradient between two cliffs. Obviously I wanted a rockier stream bordering on rapids; however I thought that excessive for such a small body of H2O. I used the mayor mode sub-arctic tree controller for the major flora in this area.

The next section downstream is a wider gentler slope and I wanted to attempt some form of weaving in the river. I laid out the basic weave first before beginning my flora plopping. It is a tough process getting the balance between too much interest and too little interest in any particular scene. I like to think I am getting better at it but I am by no means the best.

Just to round off this update I have a couple of shots of the area as it currently stands. Now I may have done these three little sections of this one stream but the surrounding hills remain untouched at the time of writing. But there you have it, that is how I am making my streams.

See you soon.