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Proccess of Making the last 2 Maps for LOTC AMA


Kilgrim
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How I made Arcas/Atlas in WorldPaiter

 

 

I’m really bored during CoronaVirus and I was looking at all my old map files for Worldpainter and thought it’d be cool to share the process of making a map for LOTC

 

While I don’t play LOTC at all anymore, I have been a member since 2011 way back in Aegis the first map of the server before WorldPainter even existed. A place where the world was just an edited version of a default minecraft. Times have changed now though and all of LOTC’s maps have been either hand built with voxel practically from scratch or done so in-tandem with WorldPainter. I’d like to give you guys some insight on how I went about creating the last two maps for LOTC and if you have any questions afterwards feel free to reply below and I’ll try to answer them!

 

 

Concept Stage:

The first thing the WorldDev team did to figure out how the map was generally going to look was by finding concept art or making some. Here’s the original concept outline art for Atlas for example:

 

Spoiler

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This the original concept that I found on google images for Atlas. You can probably tell some of the semblance to the map if you played back then.

 

Here as well you can find the original concept art cooked up by seventh for the current map Arcas. IIRC this was made using a generator for Seventh’s D&D campaign maps.

Spoiler

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Moving to WorldPainter:

Now that the team has officially decided on a proper concept and I’m tasked with converting this imagine into WorldPainter. The easiest way to do this is to use the image as an overlay and conform the image to the size of map we want to make.

Overall it’ll come out looking a little like this:
 

 

Spoiler

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Here you can see that the world has pretty much taken shape and I’ve kinda decided where everything is going to be at this point. All the landmasses are made and now it’s time to generate ideas for biomes. You can already see the beginnings of sorting out what biomes will be where and how I’ve somewhat separated the areas with white lines in WorldPainter. 

 

Before I go any further I should probably explain how WorldPainter works for those who aren’t familiar with the program. Basically WorldPainter is a program that interprets grey-scale images also known as Height-maps in order to create terrain such as mountains, plateaus, or rolling hills. A height-map is basically read by the program based on how white or black the image is. So the more white an area of an image is, the higher the terrain is, the more black the image is, the deeper it is. Here’s an example of a height-map for one of the mountains I use in WorldPainter.

Spoiler

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Here’s an example of what that looks like in WorldPainter:

 

Spoiler

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WorldPainter is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to creating Minecraft maps and there are many ways to use it that I won’t really be able to cover completely here but there are many amazing tutorials you can find on YouTube that will probably convey more than what I can show here.

 

Finalizing Terrain:

 

Now that we’re deeper into the creations of the map, we’ve decided for the most part what things are going to look like and where their going to be we can start completing the terrain of specific biomes. This includes rivers, savannahs, rolling hills, plains, canyons, mountains, and more. When we’ve finally finished all of that which took a lot of hours over 2-3 weeks we end up with something like this image:

Spoiler

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Here we can see the map is really starting to come together. I’ve added some colors to the mountains, I’ve begun adding beaches along the coasts, snowy and frost regions are done and there’s even some other things on the map that you might think look weird such as the bright green blotches. Those are what are called custom layers in WorldPainter. Basically there are 6 custom layers but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to cover 3 of them: Object layers, Ground Cover Layers, and Cave Layers. 

 

Object layers are what allow me to place hundreds of trees and bushes accross the entire map with ease. The foundation of these layers are schematics that I’ve found after hours and hours of diggins through repositories for trees, rocks, bushes, plants, corals, spikes all crazy kinds of schematics that I’ve hand picked to be used for LOTC’s map. (This process is probably the most pain in the ass of everything here). After finding the trees, rocks, bushes, whatever I need to make a forest feel nice I’m able to compile it all neatly into a brush that I can dot wherever I want on the map. For Arcas I believe I used roughly 200+ unique schematics to populate the world.

 

Ground Cover layers are where I can choose pre-existing minecraft blocks like grass, flowers, leaves etc. to cover the ground. With arcas I can’t remember exactly how it happened but all of the grass from a layer I had got deleted from WorldEdit or the final export I can't remember specifically.

 

Cave Layers are how the crazy caves where the dwarves live were made. WorldPainter has a really great tool to create just these amazing caverns and if you have the patience you can make some elaborate cave labyrinths.

 

A lot of these layers require a lot of trial and error. Usually how it will go is I’ll find the schematics I want for a particular forest after hours of examining them in-game and digging for the correct files and then creating the layer in WorldPainter. Then I’ll place them down where I want them and next I’ll export that specific area to minecraft to look at in-game. Once I’m satisfied then it’s practically finalized until the final export. 

 

The amount of time spent into creating these layers is probably my least favorite part of the WorldPainting process but it’s some of the most important because what’s a forest without any trees right? Overall Acras has 103 custom layers that I created each of them containing anywhere from 1-12 schematics. After hand placing all of those 103 layers onto the map you kinda get this mish mash of colors

 

Now at least in WorldPainter the map is finished and this is the actual view of what Arcas looked like on my final export of WorldPainter.

 

Spoiler

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(Not scene is all the hand placed biome layers which is ACTUALLY the worst part of WorldPainting because it’s so annoying and boring.)

 

 

 

Here’s a 3D Isometric View as well:

Spoiler

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There’s a lot of nuance and techniques that were glossed over in my explanation but I hope you can get a gist of what goes into making an LOTC map at least on the surface of it all. The overall time it took from my first file creation in WorldPainter for Arcas was on 4/10/2018 and my final save where I did the export was on 7/14/2018 so 3 months of WorldPainting in my spare time. To be honest I put a lot more effort into Arcas than I did Atlas and I learned a lot from creating Atlas which allowed me to improve on Arcas. Moreover, for all it’s faults, I’m really proud of how Arcas turned out visually even if it was plagued with lackluster pathing/gameplay issues at the start.

 

Most of my time with Arcas went into WorldPainting and then hand Voxelling/WorldEditting in game to make the world even better than the WorldPainter stage. There’s a lot of bureaucracy behind the scenes when it comes to making a map for the server that I think leads to a lot of the pitfalls of the last two maps that I made. Communication and drive are one thing that I believe plagued both maps. During Arcas especially there were times where if I had questions about an area I was working on or was looking for feedback from the team there would be no response or just a, “looks great” (insert generic response here) and so I’d just go with it. I felt that this led to some areas of the map either being repetitive or boring for players. Moreover, a lot of the map development is kept hidden behind lock and key rather than exposing the map development to players and the community to get continual feedback on development. Honestly, this is where most of the faults in the map making comes into play. If LOTC was more open about their development when it came to maps maybe people wouldn’t be complaining about shitty systems or nation placement from day 1. 

 

 

Regardless, while I don’t play LOTC anymore and probably never will again aside from popping on just to see what people have changed about Arcas, making maps is a fun passion of mine and I hope you guys enjoyed the past two maps!

 

Here’s an album of high-res images for Arcas world building process:

https://imgur.com/a/IvQHtJV

 

Also here’s an album of images for Atlas:

https://imgur.com/a/K5ae7Gq

 

Also if you have a chance check out the desert river valley and the sunken mesa I spent a literal month every-day hand voxelling and WorldEditting to make that place it’s my favorite two biomes on the map!

 

If you have any questions feel free to ask below!

 

Hopefully the formatting isn’t borked I never post on the forums!

Edited by Kilgrim
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501 said he made atlas bro, is this true? These are conflicting points.....

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13 minutes ago, MinionManXDD said:

501 said he made atlas bro, is this true? These are conflicting points.....

501’s involement in Atlas was mainly him creating the regions and working on the roads other than that I don’t really remember him do anything else when it came to directly how the map looked besides needing his approval for things to go forward.

Edited by Kilgrim
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34 minutes ago, Kilgrim said:

501’s involement in Atlas was mainly him creating the regions and working on the roads other than that I don’t really remember him do anything else when it came to directly how the map looked besides needing his approval for things to go forward.

Lol he told us in Urguan discord he did it all himself. He also told us he escorted some lovely ladies to their car the other day

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just thought id toss in comparison to two other maps for servers ive played on

https://prnt.sc/6mn1k6 

(https://i.imgur.com/ilBlm5I.jpg)
ilBlm5I.jpg 

These are both from 2013/14ish so i thought it was interesting to add in how things change

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Hi Kilgrim

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13 minutes ago, SquakHawk said:

just thought id toss in comparison to two other maps for servers ive played on

https://prnt.sc/6mn1k6 

(https://i.imgur.com/ilBlm5I.jpg)

These are both from 2013/14ish so i thought it was interesting to add in how things change

Those maps both looks cool, the picture from imgur looks like the map was made with WorldMachine which is a software that can be used with WorldPainter to make some more realistic looking terrain. Typically with my maps I like to combine more of the fantasy and realistic terrain types. I also never learned how to  properly use WorldMachine but it’s a really cool tool!

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For someone who joined the server literally yesterday, it’s really nice to see the level of detail that are put into these maps. Can’t wait to fully explore Arcas! Some really great work here

Edited by EchoCloud
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