MAKE A TREASURE MAP IN GAEA
Cirstyn has moved from Radeon’s ProRender to the RizomUV team, where she does product management as well as modelling, UV mapping and tutorial writing.
You've seen Nathan Drake hold one, and Arthur Morgan draw doodles on his. Maps are a staple in game art, not only as part of the UI but also as hero props, treasure maps or placeables, helping to drive the narrative. And that’s what we're going to create here with Gaea.
First, we'll procedurally generate a terrain and its features, mixing and blending GeoPrimitive, LookDev and Water nodes, before we let Erosion do the heavy lifting into a terrain which we'll turn into a map using the Cartography node, complete with a detour through portals to add textures before building and exporting it all via Output nodes. Once exported, we’ll add some finishing touches to the Cartography export in Photoshop (or your image editor of choice).
When working on a map, it’s worth noting there are a few rules of nature and worldbuilding worth remembering. Lone mountains are generally an anomaly unless you're creating a (sleeping) volcano. Mountains are created by tectonic plates pushing against each other, mixed with volcanic activity.
