# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > 3D modeling (map elements and height maps) >  R&D 3D handdrawn look

## Troedel

I dusted off my free Houdini Apprentice version and started to avoid learning to draw. I always wanted to create lightweight, easy to manage and interactive heightfield creation systems that can cover greater areas of terrain. So I created a network that can beautify rough and basic mountain ridge sculpts into somthing more like rougher ridges as shown below.



With my network I can create patches and include them in a bigger HF



There is a GoZ link for Zbrush so I sent this over. The HF was converted to a mesh first, otherwise Zbrush crashes instantly. Took me a while to figure out...




For Zbrush this is pretty low res, I figure one could sculpt hero props and other things. Handdrawn effects can be done in Zbrush with lots of options to finetune but Keyshot is faster for a first impression. Thre is a live link from Zbrush to Keyshot, so again. after 6 min rendertime and 1 min Photoshop..




There is much room for improvement but I will go further down this road.

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## Troedel

Made some progress concerning "woods". Still not sure about the render settings, but "getting there"

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## Wired

Interesting. How did you do the woods?

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## Troedel

> Interesting. How did you do the woods?


At first I experimented with treelike geo, that did not work very well. To much geo doesn´t work well with the toon shader. At least I could not make it work. So I just scattered randomly deformed spheres on the surface and tinkered with scale and density. This is the result. I had to tweak the material for the trees to make it fit to the landscape. Next would be a "symbol for a bigger city/castle in the empty center of the map.

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## Falconius

The forest work pretty good.  Planning on going through and hand painting it afterwards?

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## Troedel

> The forest work pretty good.  Planning on going through and hand painting it afterwards?


That is the plan. Perhaps I will try that doing some compositing from different materials. But that is an adventure on it´s own  :Wink:

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## Josiah VE

Huge fan of those mountains, so much depth and detail on them. Great stuff!

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## Troedel

> Huge fan of those mountains, so much depth and detail on them. Great stuff!


Once I get the process down I plan to draw a bit more carefully with some DEM reference pictures of the Alps. I think there can be massive improvements with a bit more work. They look good with the current orthographic camera, azimuth (? correct term ?) of about 45°. Topdown these mountains are spindly creatures, as seen in the first post. But your approval shows me I´m on the right track. Thank you!

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## Troedel

So its adjustable.. ISO Quickrender ( very low res )

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## Troedel

And a quick one from the material tests. I think I´m close.

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## Falconius

I don't know why but that ISO shot makes everything looks super flat.  Like its a shot of piece of paper with drawings on it rather than a 3d relief.  Perhaps it's just the zoom level since the material test one looks 3d.  Though the material test one also has a problem in that the darker shading around the forest and the castle thing make them look more substantial than the mountains.  Great progress so far, this style looks really good I think.

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## Troedel

Falconius, you are absolut right. I tinkered with the materials a lot trying to improve on that, it was much worse, but there is still much room. It depends very much on th lighting setup. But everytime I change something to improve on the heavy shadows something else breaks. Devil is in the details, as always  :Wink:  Thanks for your critique, it´s the only way to make progress.

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## Troedel

I moved on to compositing, cretaed the scroll and border in 3d, too.

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## Falconius

Oh man, I'm definitely going to take a crack at this sort of thing for my next regional map.  It's going very well.  I never even thought of doing the secondary things like borders or banners in 3D, though I guess it should be pretty obvious.  Although I did consider doing the label texts themselves in 3d for various maps I never got far enough along to test the idea out.  I like the mountains peaking up over the top border there.

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## Vigilus

I am really impressed with your work.  Can you do sharper mountain peaks too?

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## Troedel

Sry for my late answer, I´m pretty sure I could do sharper mountain peaks. I will give it a shot and post the result  :Wink:

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## AaronSchmidt

This is super cool! I am not a z-brush user but it looks like a good use of it. I likethe way the occlusion works on the mountains but the occluded shadows under the trees are a bit dark. 

Do you find this easier than hand drawn? 

I imagine a use for this style of map as some sort of video graphic so you can do a camera move around the world.

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## jplet

This is very cool. Are there any plans for a tutorial? Im primarily a 2D artist but your work here has def piqued my interest in 3D. Im working on a large-scale map of a continent and trying to get a 3D-esque relief effect on my elevations and terrain is proving tricky.

Also, one thing Id be curious if you could do with this system youre working with- your mountains look great, and they have a very Rocky Mountain/Swiss Alps vibe to them, but would you be able to emulate the appearance of the Appalachains? I was reading up on relief drawing recently and saw it mentioned how different they look from the Rockies and I had never realized that before. Theyre a totally different sort of mountain! Is that something your system could do? Or would you have to develop a new method to get the appearance right?

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## Troedel

Better late tha never...

@AaronSchmidt    This is animateable most certainly but I have not looked into it. Some future project perhaps. Getting the occlusion right was a pita. Is it easier than handdrawn? Depends on your artistic ability. I´ve got to say that a good handdrwan map always will look more authentic. And it is way cheaper  :Wink: . For me it´s the combination of curisity regarding 3D techniques, love of maps and the luxury of not being damned to achieve something sellable. I can wander where I like.

@jplet öhm, I designed those mountains on a whim. But as the handdrawn lines depend on the underlying DEM I would say it´s possible. But recreating correct DEM´s out of nothing is extremly time consuming and, in my opinion, not the way to go for large scale continent maps. If you got a solution let me know...  :Wink:

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