Dornish Marches Terra

[Azulejo]

¡Hola otra vez!
I've been collecting more inspirational images for the Dornish Marches terrain. Some disclaimers:

• They fall on the drier side, so they may not be great for the Stormlands, for example.
• Most of them are granite based areas, which conflicts with what we know about the Red Mountains (sandstone and well, red).
• Seasons can severely alter the appearance of these regions. Most seem to have been taken during winter or spring.
• Many of these landscapes are heavily human altered, retaining little of their original aspect.
• Some of them aren't exactly medieval, mainly due to land consolidation in the XIX and XX centuries.

Despite this, I think they will be very useful to build an increasingly defined regional style, and if not, it is always good to look at them. Maybe in a future project they will be useful for someone!

Some favourites below!

Vitigudino (Salamanca)


Vitigudino (Salamanca)


Vitigudino (Salamanca)


Trujillo (Cáceres)


Cáceres


Sierra de Guadarrama (Madrid-Segovia)


Castillo de Zafra (Guadalajara)


Castillo de Zafra (Guadalajara)

 

[AerioOndos]

The last three images and the first image are what I'd be wanting to see for pretty much the entire region but with longer grasses or bushes in the other places, similar to the unkept roadsides ( Trujillo, Vitigudino ). This would then morph into pyreneean mountains.

Also, red granite is possible. There is plenty near where I live, and when it rains the greyer rocks return to being a redder colour again

 

[CashBanks]

So thinking this for Zone 8 for around Summerhall (Style 1 from my last post)



And this for the Zone 4 transition area to the North. Pretty standard grass lands with a few scattered bits of dead scrub.



Since we're ok with making the grassland around Summerhall a bit more wet than the area to the south west around Harvest Hall (Zone 7), I'm thinking a kingswood forest could probably be justified on the north side of Summerhall, mostly just small oaks and coniferous trees.

 

[AerioOndos]

That looks really good Cash, I love it.

 

[CashBanks]

I had another slightly more radical suggestion, replace all the Stormlands Terrain in the Marches with Stormlands Alt

(click the gif if the quality's garbage)

To me it seems like a more natural fit, it will ease the transition into the reds and yellows of Dorne and it's much less contrasting with the grasslands.
The chocolate mountains would stay in the "wet" stormlands region on the east coast.

Keen to get opinions though.

 

[DutchGuard]

I fully support this.

 

[Emoticone11]

I don't really like the way the pure stormlands alt images look aesthetically. But playing around with striations so the stormlands alt is the dominant rock (sort of like the last few in the GIF, but done with horizontally stretched Perlin noise?) might look better.

EDIT: also maybe minor hints of the grey sandstone terrainset, which will help it transition with areas like Felwood to the North?

 

[CashBanks]

I meant to include some more detailed screenshots of the test I’d been doing on the mountain to the west of Summerhall, which might be close to what you had in mind and mixing in some grey stone terrain set sounds good too.

Main concern is the level of custom terra each mountain would need if we had to apply the striations to every single one in the Marches. A 1:1 swap is doable (like how did the snowy spruce leaves swap), but most of the Stormlands projects in the area are already completed so they wouldn’t be getting any specific attention anytime soon unless we do them all now.

Ideally we could add some more variance to the Stormlands Alt block so the vanilla default has a bit more detail so we could make the 1:1 swap and then focus on sprucing to the most prominent mountains close to projects.

 

[AerioOndos]

Many completed projects yes, but a huge area conflicts canon.
I know I keep blathering on about this again and again but the Slayne River valley and projects on it are pretty much slated for redo because of WOIAF canon (waterfalls, rapids, yet somehow a major stormlands river trading route) which means that there is possibly larger scale settlements in the valley than there are currently.
The valley includes two of the larger completed projects, Swann of Stonehelm and Grandison of Grandview.
I'd say don't bother with doing the striations in that valley until after redos have been done because it is pointless doing stuff now only for it to be redone later.

 

[Emoticone11]

Main concern is the level of custom terra each mountain would need if we had to apply the striations to every single one in the Marches. A 1:1 swap is doable (like how did the snowy spruce leaves swap), but most of the Stormlands projects in the area are already completed so they wouldn’t be getting any specific attention anytime soon unless we do them all now.

Right - I just mean a script consisting of a couple Perlin commands that you can easily apply to a large selection in the same way you would with a single command. I think Iwan had an idea of doing something like this to our remaining WorldPainter mountains anyways. I experimented with it briefly in Wickenden (undone now though) and was able to get pretty nice results without much effort.

Adding variation to the texture is pretty much a no-go. We gave that a number of attempts back when we were designing the textures. Nothing tiles well.

 

[CashBanks]

Right - I just mean a script consisting of a couple Perlin commands that you can easily apply to a large selection in the same way you would with a single command. I think Iwan had an idea of doing something like this to our remaining WorldPainter mountains anyways. I experimented with it briefly in Wickenden (undone now though) and was able to get pretty nice results without much effort.

Adding variation to the texture is pretty much a no-go. We gave that a number of attempts back when we were designing the textures. Nothing tiles well.

Ah fair enough, I had a breakthrough with adding specific y coordinate masks the other day so maybe there’s some potential there.

If I put some more tests together maybe we can put it to the mods for a vote, since it’s a fairly big change to the map.

 

[CashBanks]

With some significant assistance from Emote I've cobbled together a script that does a not too bad job of auto adding stratification layers.
The base is Stormlands Alt, with layers of Stormlands classic, Eastern Islands terra set, and Wet Stormlands Pebbles



Shouldn't be too hard to update all the Marches terra with this style if peeps are into it.

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

Personally I'd kill any use of the chocolate turd Stormlands classic block with fire. Either not use it all or instead look into hues that are part of the natural red sandstone palette.

Gray seems to be part of the natural palette and in terms of brightness, I think your use of Eastern Islands works really well! Instead of using wet pebbles here just because of their color, I'd offer to retexture the Stormlands classic to that hue!

If you want slanted lines instead of straight ones I can recommend you to check out the math function of FAWE. Essentially you could create several slanted 3D planes to dissect the ranges at an angle, try:

//generate -o red (round(x/12)+round(z/15)+(y))%3==0


//generate -o red(round(x/4)+round(z/4)+(y))%20==0
//generate -o blue (round(z/15)%3)==0

The '-o' flag uses the map's coordinate system as a reference (instead of the selection specific coordinate system from -1 .. 1 //generate would use without it).
If a modulo ('%') b = 0 then that a is divisible by b without rest, this helps me define a regular grid with an even distance between points, VAR = b is therefore the variable that determines the density of points along a grid in our selection.
Now, we jitter the points a little by allowing VAR to fluctuate randomly on the x- and z-Axis by the number between 0 and 1 returned by 'random()'

VAR is a number of your choice and essentially the spacing for the 3D grid you create with this. There is much more mathy stuff you do including SIN, COS and TAN which at a large enough amplitude will likely give you subtle changes

Links:
Generate Command: https://wiki.intellectualsites.com/FastAsyncWorldEdit/Commands#generate-pattern-expression-h-r-o-c
Expression Syntax: https://worldedit.enginehub.org/en/latest/usage/other/expressions/

 

[Emoticone11]

I don't really want to see the dark brown stormlands striations killed entirely, but maybe reduced a little bit and made so they're not entirely horizontal (if you're using Perlin, just stretching out in the y direction a bit more and reducing the frequency & threshold might help. I know Tham is currently working on some scripts to apply diagonal striations for the Stormlands terra though, and I'm really interested to see what he comes up with.

 

[CashBanks]

Yeah I tried playing with the y value/frequency/threshold but it generally just had a tendency to make it look more blobby, certainly up for trying out the angled expressions though

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

Also, Castillo de Zafra, that HBO chose as the Tower of Joy, is surrounded by a beautiful landscape, with reddish soil.
View attachment 5375View attachment 5376

I do not know in which region they could be used within the scheme suggested by lemonbear, but I leave it here in case it may be useful.

PS: I promise I'm not being paid by the Spanish Tourism Agency

I tried my hand at similar and castle with the two decent stormlands blocks.

 

[AerioOndos]

I’m not a fan of using dun blocks to represent red sandstone, nor am I a fan of retexturing stormlands terrainset further. It’s brilliant for Cape Wrath and the rainwood, just not so much for the red mountains.

On the topic of sandstone pallets though, I’m going to say that if you want red sandstone structures, make a proper red sandstone blockset that matches the terrainset. Not the dun. It would be possible to use it everywhere from Blackmont into the stormlands and would look v good imo.
Also Endy has been saying it would be good for the red mountains for a while. (Sorry for dragging you in)

The striations are looking good, I’m really loving it. I’d say the move to not be horizontal all the time wouldn’t be good, it’ll be interesting to see how perlin turn out with that. I could definitely see more red block mixes though, maybe those wouldn’t be best around the coastline?
And yeah the grey islands block looks very very good to me

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

This could be pretty nice for striations:

//generate -o white ((round(x/6+sin(x/50)*5)+round(z/3+sin(z/150)*3))+(y))%20==0

Here is a quick explanation what is what:

//generate -o white ((round(x/SLOPEX+sin(x/PERIODX)*AMPLITUDEX)+round(z/SLOPEZ+sin(z/PERIODZ)*AMPLITUDEZ))+(y))%SPACEBETWEEN==0

 

[CashBanks]

Thanks Tham!
I've had some success with using the sine and perlin approaches. I think a mix of both looks good so it doesn't look too uniform.



Can see the major difference it makes compared to the standard Stormlands chocolate brown.


So if this looks good in principle then I can start updating the rest of the Marches (would allow me to call Summerhall finished too )


It also makes a significantly improves the plausibility of the transition to the Dornish terrain set too.

 

[SseriousBusiness]

I like the result! But I still feel like it looks very "artificial" I guess, idk a word for it. Maybe in hand work after the script could better it, or maybe if the scripts could vary in thickness for the striations, but only slightly like a 0 and 2 thickness variation in small areas, I think could make it feel more organic. I don't know though I'm not a geology expert.
Oh! and not to mention, mountains and hills on terrain that has striations the lines would have vertical and bent areas so idk about making that in a script idk if its possible

https://i.redd.it/xbbirxwmoq831.jpg

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/geological-rock-striations-make-patterns-geological-rock-striations-make-patterns-mountain-face-glacier-bay-national-park-120029865.jpg