The new heightmap is looking great. I mean really great! Sometimes adversity can be a blessing in disguise. I’m still salty about losing the work I put into the old one, though. Oh well. Back up, back up, back up.
I decided to see what happened if I bent the rules a bit and let some of my terrain creep into the danger zone past 76% black. This is a very mountainous worldspace with lots of changes in height, some of it extreme, and darkening the heightmap enough to get below the 76% black cutoff causes me to lose a lot of terrain detail.
Oh yeah! Them’s some good lookin’ mountains!
Okay, I can see some issues. The highest peaks have turned into jagged, sawtooth edges. It doesn’t look bad, but those wont be fun to climb in-game. Still, I’m more than happy with the rest of the map. I’ll hand-edit each peak in the Creation Kit using the smooth feature in the landscape editor. I’m not touching that heightmap editor with a 10-foot pole.
Its important to hop in game regularly and check out your worldspace. The landscape rendered in the Creation Kit can look a lot different than in-game. Case in point:
Looks pretty good, right?
Yikes, that’s a deep crater! The rim is way too sharp, so I’ll smooth it down a bit.
I’ve started making more assets for the worldspace. I needed some volcanic water, but I wasn’t happy with the vanilla volcanic water. This is what I’m going for:
That lake is called Boiling Springs Lake, and it’s even more spectacular in person. Yes, it is actually boiling. I’ll be replicating this site in-game.
First try at some new volcanic water. This is done by creating a new Water Type and messing with the settings.
Fun times!
Forsaken: The Mountain of Fire 