Monday, February 6, 2017

Adding the Details

In the previous posting, I developed a new family of mountain outlines.  Now I'm going to add back in some of the features from my previous mountain work.  This is mostly a matter of re-using the existing code, so I'm not going to go through it all again in detail.  First up is to add the scribbled shading.
In keeping with my new philosophy about a seamless sequence from tallest mountain to shortest hills, when I added in the shading, I modified the existing code so that as the mountain gets smaller, more curve is added to the ridge line that defines the shading, so that the low hills look more rounded and soft than the high mountains.
Now I'll add some back-and-forth perturbation of the ridge line with the same philosophy: the magnitude of the perturbation will diminish as the mountain gets smaller.  Here it is outlined in red to make it obvious:
The tall mountains get lots of back-and-forth in the ridge line, and the low hills virtually none.  Here's what that looks like on the map, with the ridge line drawn in to make it more obvious:
Next, let me add in a tapered foot.  Low mountains get a long smoothly tapered foot while the tall mountains get little or none.
Now I will add perturbations to the mountain outline.  This adds noise in the Y axis (up and down) along the contour as well as a smaller amount of noise perpendicular to the contour.
Combining two mountains into a single mountain:
Lastly, I want to add back in "clefts" which I've generalized (largely due to admiring this map) to be on either side of the mountain:
On a previous posting, someone on Reddit (account since deleted, so I can't credit him) suggested making the base of the mountains rounded downward to indicate depth.  I've implemented that:
And then added some jagged perturbations to that, decreasing with the size of the mountain:

There are a few other features from my original mountains that I'm not going to re-implement, mostly because at map scale they turned out to be (largely) irrelevant.  So here's what the new mountains look like on a map, side-by-side with the old version:
Obviously there are some superficial differences here in line size, placement, etc., but overall I'm happier that the feel of the mountains is more consistent and organic.  There's also obviously some work to be done on placement of the mountain symbols.
 
And just for fun, here's the same map rendered in the "D&D" style:

No comments:

Post a Comment