An early version of the landscaping with added water… There’s a lot of work to do to get it right, but it’s a start. Images with and without features for comparison.
First image is a river running between the Lith of Mitharg and down the Plains of Gard. The second is a river running through the Plains of Blood.
Looks great… I don’t know how you keep going, given the shenanigans you’ve been dealing with pal!! Really appreciate the effort!!
Cheers
Alf
That’s a good start indeed!
Wow that looks great.
That brings back even more memories than the Citadel map conversion did – is it a dozen years already since I went through this process for M/MU? Wow! Even the problems look like the ones I had. (though your early screenshots look a lot better than mine did) 🙂
I remember the Forest of Thrall had become the Lake Thrall, and a river flowed into it from Herath. Then I spent ages trying to figure out a way to have a bridge across the mouth of the river – never did find an acceptable solution. I can’t remember if the Citadel had bridges across its rivers or just shallows where armies could cross. I’ll be most interested to see how you tackle that aspect, and also if you find a more effective way to smooth the land/water edges than we did.
Keep going!
The problem is movement. When you move forward or turn, the movement of the terrain causes issues with the blended floor. If I did a snap/cut like the original I could smooth everything up nicely.
At the moment I place all the water down first. Then a second pass I put the land over the top. Then the third pass is for the actual terrain. It blends pretty well for my rough ass images – but then the movement kicks in… 🙂
I hadn’t thought of the movement. M/MU only has the flip-view as with the original, so it gets away with patching the rough edges, but that won’t work when you have animated movement.
The rest is pretty much the same as M/MU, water first, then the ground, then the terrain billboards. In fact, the water in M/MU is just a surface layer under everything else – this allows for a wave pattern, but also has limitations.
It will be interesting to see what solution you come up with. 🙂