My FAVOURITE Way to Create a Realistic Fantasy Map

[@_wildcard]

I found your channel yesterday after exploring the same workflows and learning Gaea. I immediately subscribed. I'm super excited to hear you're going to attempt to translate your work onto a globe! Using the Perlin node rather than a Voronoi node seems to have made the mountains alot more aesthetically pleasing to me in comparison to your previous videos, but I know that each node has their own time and place based on the map. I am very thankful for your videos that are helping me in making my own fantasy map in 3D. There are not many people on this platform doing what you're doing, so thank you for spreading the knowledge!

[@KilroysKartography]

@@_wildcard Thank you, I'm super happy these videos are helpful! I agree, I like the perlin node also. I'm also learning quite a bit making these tutorials!

[@WalidDingsdale]

a cool walkthrough, looking forward to watching next update, thanks for sharing your insight and skill.

[@KilroysKartography]

Thank you 😊 I'm glad it's useful!

[@junechevalier]

I have a similar workflow, but I used World Creator for the erosion sim. I've been considering using Houdini since I'm using the software in my professional work anyway, but yes, killer workflow!

[@macronomicus]

Its a great ideation tool, quick & gives some useful suggestions, I found exporting a 2:1 image 2048x1024 works great for creating a whole planet of continents, you can cut the heightmap in two, import both to Gaea, then use nodes to shift & blend the two sides with some nice undersea crevasse in the middle (or whatever), then shift to export both sides, then recombine them in Krita(or any paint program) so you can do an equirectangular projection of the map on to a globe in 3d. Works great! Its especially nice to get a rough of the whole planet, you can always zoom in to do detailed areas if need be, but just having that whole planet helps me to contemplate the smaller areas, also what Im building will have whole planet views too so its needed.

[@macronomicus]

There's a tutorial here called "Quadspinner Gaea - Patching edges to make multiple tiles seam together" that shows the node trickery to have 2 square tiles in one build like i mentioned above, so you dont need to use the Tile feature or lose resolution cropping the square to a rectangle. Once they're blended do the shift for each side to export maps for each side.

[@macronomicus]

you can also export the underwater ocean areas if you tinker with styles to stay darker than above sea level & also enable Render Ocean Heights as monochrome

[@KilroysKartography]

Thank you for this! I have done a globe tutorial, but I was lucky in that I only had Ocean in the centre of the map, so recombining the two halves was simple. I've just checked out the tutorial you suggested and it's a really neat workflow! Thank you for sharing your insight, I'll make sure to give you credit if I include this in a future video

[@macronomicus]

@@KilroysKartography There's always so many ways to do things, gotta love tech & creativity. After I left the remark I went and downloaded VUE(which is free now) its different than GAEA, but it can do some neat stuff too, & can output huge mesh/images too. You can even use them together, start in GAEA for smaller highly custom bits, then combine them in VUE to a mega scene. Blender is another great tool too, thats my landing place after these apps to optimize & such before I bring those into a game engine. lts all so much fun, we're blessed to have so many great tools available to us, & so much sharing & tutorials on youtube as well. Keep up the great work, I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors.

[@daggergblue]

8:34 I think those random bits and trash could serve well as Oases and the like. Those are some Bob Ross style "Happy Accidents."

[@KilroysKartography]

Exactly!

[@bladewraith]

I snippet the biomes legend and pull that into photoshop too. 1. Pull the legend into PS as a new layer. 2. Reposition it somewhere in the sea. 3. Merge layers. 3. Do your color selection as normal but pick from the legend. 4. After you mask each layer, just paint black on the mask where the legend is to make sure you are not capturing that.

[@KilroysKartography]

Nice! What a great idea. I'm definitely doing the same going forward

[@bladewraith]

@@KilroysKartography Thanks. Just a question on this.....if doing it this way, would you combine all the tree biomes as a single export? Obviously, the way I've done it has created multiple such as temperate rainforest, tropical rainforest etc.

[@KilroysKartography]

@@bladewraith yes I would do one for all the tree biomes, invert it and plug into the inhibition input of the trees node

[@bladewraith]

@@KilroysKartographywhy invert? I seem to get trees whether I do that or not…just the position changes

[@KilroysKartography]

@@bladewraith Sorry I assumed that you exported a mask with a black background, and white to indicate where the trees should be (to match the other masks). As this is plugged in to the inhibition port of the trees node, it is inhibiting growth where we want trees to grow. This is the opposite of what we want, so it needs to be inverted. Your mask might be different though

[@AvantNovis]

Nice!

[@PaddyPharo]

The Video is awesome...Love it! But somehow I don't get the same results even I did it exactly as shown in the video. my textures from the different bioms don't combine as they should. somehow they overwrite the colors i choosed before and in the end the map is just blue with a bit of snow. You have an idea what the problem could be?

[@KilroysKartography]

Hmm this is strange, are you definitely connecting the masks at each stage?

[@dakkon77blackblade20]

I am tinkering with erosion settings, input noise, scale of the overall map at the moment. If you along the way could fit in a video diving deeper into the settings and getting scale right (optically that means) that would be incredibly helpful.

[@KilroysKartography]

That sounds like a good idea for a video :D Thanks for the suggestion!

[@-TheLegendHimself-]

is there a way to change the ratio of the map in gaea? I have a rectangular map that gets compressed when i put it into gaea and i haven't found a way to change the ratio.

[@KilroysKartography]

You can't change the aspect ratio in Gaea, but you can force your map into a square aspect ratio by expanding the canvas down in Photoshop or GIMP. I discuss this in one of my other videos 😁 kzbin.info/www/bejne/m6SZpp2koKakoKs

[@-TheLegendHimself-]

@@KilroysKartography thanks

[@gani2546]

Hi why do I not have the Mask option below each nodes?

[@KilroysKartography]

There's an option in the settings to enable or disable these I think. You should be able to see it by default, but in any case if you drag the mask into the centre of the node, the option to use it as a mask should appear

[@alex-sci-fi-stories]

Could you create a open world map for me? I need 500k km map with at least 10 biomes and project needs to be ready to import to unreal engine 5. Let me know what requirements you need from me and price. Hightmap needs to be 256k or spliced into 8k tiles

[@KilroysKartography]

Right now Gaea2 struggles with large exports, the tiled builds aren't working properly but there's something in their roadmap that should enable this towards the end of the year 😁 Reach out to me through my Etsy shop (link is in the description) and we can discuss

[@alex-sci-fi-stories]

@KilroysKartography what about world creator? Do you have access and some experience with it?

[@AhmadAli-kv2ho]

7.03

[@bladewraith]

Sorry to bother again. My rivers are in the sea even after all the steps. Been over it all twice but not sure where I went wrong.

[@KilroysKartography]

No worries at all. So the key things to check are 1. Look at the mask I refer to at 41.30 Are you seeing a pure black and white image, with white for the land 2. For the combine node, do you have the output from the HSL node (the sea colour) in the top port, and the output from the previous combine node (land and rivers) in the bottom port. If both of these are true, and you are still having issues, it might be worth joining the Quadspinner discord for help. I can keep an eye out for your post

[@KilroysKartography]

41:37 *

[@bladewraith]

​@@KilroysKartography the mask is interesting. For me it is a nice solid white for the land, but grey for the water area. And it is behaving oddly. If I make any changes to that node e.g. clamp it instantly turns solid white and i have to click and unclick invert (the bottom one) to to make it go back. Very odd behaviour.

[@bladewraith]

Figured it out. Something was funky with the SEA node level. I had it at 0.09 and it was correctly showing all the land but it resulted in the mask being white. I adjusted and it is now at 0.38 and the mask is the correct black and white.

[@bladewraith]

As an aside. I added 'blur' to the HSL and whacked it on max. Really smooths out the water. Of course, that's a personal taste issue.