What happens when you take ten islands from a Gaea, put them together in GIMP, and scale them up? You get an island archipelago with a realistic scale. Inspired by @Philipo98's GAEA Island, I've been playing around with my favorite terrain generator to create an ambitious project. This is version 0.1 of my heightmap: It's 4096 square, each island 1024 or 2048 within the group. But 4 km didn't give me the realistic scale I wanted, so I doubled it. Still not big enough. Unfortunately, the islands get too spaced if they're scaled up too much, so this heightmap is going to change significantly. As I go, I'll be sharing each component of the map. Feel free to use these islands in your maps. All I ask is a credit in your info.json file and your mod write-up. My favorite of the islands is number 2. Here's a visualization, which looks nothing like it will in the final map, but provides a general impression: And here's the scaled heightmap for the island: I don't have an actual map to share yet, but import this heightmap at 2048 or 4096 for a good map starter. You'll have to smooth the terracing (use a wide brush with 20% pressure). And check out Philipo98's map (link above). More to come soon...
I created a blank 4096 square image in GIMP, then opened each heightmap as a new layer. (File > Open as Layer). The heightmap appears in the center of the image. Right-click and select Edit Attributes (at the top of the context menu), then reposition the layer by entering new X & Y coordinates. When you have everything positioned, scaled, and rotated as you want it, Export As a PNG. I'm doing some significant rework on the maps now. My layer masks were purely slope-based, and they ended up looking like crap, so I'm combining slope and height-based masks.
Sorry for the late reply, but our bunnies chewed up the internet line. I imported the map into BeamNG. The terraces were too violent for me to make them all go away by hand, so I imported the terrain into TerreSculptor and applied some Gaussian Blur. Looks very good, imported it with "squareSize":4, and the map is just amazing. I'm attaching the edited heightmap and the BeamNG terrain export. It would be cool if you could create a terrain texture based on the heightmap afterwards. And because i was to hyped about this beautiful islands i made a small fly around to demonstrate the potential of this map. Real thanks for this heightmap. See forward to create a map based on your idea <3 And see other people get inspired too.
That looks great! I'm redoing the map a bit right now. I've defined a few masks so I can make the seafloor transparent and move the islands around a bit so they're not so geometrically arranged. I'll probably create a few more tiny islands to put in between so I don't need ridiculously long bridges to connect them. I'm also defining layer masks for the initial terrain matierals. I started with slope-based masks, but they looked like crap, so I'm redefining them based on combinations of height and slope. Here's a preview of one of the islands: 1. Heightmap, 2. sand mask, 3. grass mask, 4. rock mask, 5. "sea rock" mask (maybe rocky dirt, gravel, or something similar) These are the raw Gaea exports, so they'll need to be up-sampled if you want anything bigger than 1024.
After some experiments with your heightmap, I finally managed to create a terrain texture for BeamNG. After several hours of rendering, despite many cores, the result now looks like this. On the first try, the islands were too flat. Finally, I imported the islands from -50m - 2000m and it looks great. Imported into the game with 4 meters per pixel, the only thing that bothers me is that when painting terrain, angular corners appear. I will try to upsample the heightmap to 8192x. Then you could set 2 meters per pixel and could draw much smoother. I would also like to render other climate zones if that would not take so long. I'll tinker a bit more and share my progress here. Greets
Wow! After moving on to a less ambitious project (and still having no end of trouble with terrain materials), I'm officially giving this map to @Philipo98. I might develop it some time in the future, but you're really going to make something out of this.
