My entry for the 'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament Temple of the Marxon

[MadMax]

Prototyping

I like to start my mapping process by painting on the features I would like to have in my map, I then start to sculpt the height map to match what I have painted.

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Exporting to World Machine

Then I export the heightmap to world machine and run it through an erosion

I was happy with level of detail

I moved on to trying to generate texture masks with world machine too

I also used the normals generation from jip's post about it
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/785/about-decals-generating-a-map-wide-normal-texture

This is the result of the above generation some parts I am happy with other bits need more work

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The Hard Decision

It was at this point that I decided to start over as I felt I could do better, I have still learnt from this prototype and I can expand my world machine generator from this start.

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Starting Over

I'll skip the prototyping part, this is the height map I was happy to proceed with

my final model in world machine

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Outputs from World Machine

These are the outputs from world machine

Decals and erosion

Textures

these textures are 90% where I want them I will finalise them by hand

Final Textures and decals

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Aeon Base

For the aeon base I looked through the campaign maps and took screen shots of layouts I liked

this layout is what i chose to work from

my aeon base centred around an ancient seraphim structure

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Markers and AI

resource and spawn points (mex placement credit to ftxcommando)

AI markers

nav ui

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Conclusion

During this process I have learnt a lot about how to use world machine and the workflows surrounding it, I will defiantly be using some of the techniques I have learnt going forward, I would say the moral of this story is don't be afraid to start over with your work and learn from what you didn't like.

I'll leave you with some final screen shots from the map

Good luck and have fun out there commanders max out.

[Saver]

WOW

[MadMax]

oh whoops forgot to credit ftxcommando for advise regarding mex layout

[IndexLibrorum]

Detailed textures on the cliff are pretty nice!