hi there this is Chris from killoy cartography in this tutorial series I'm going to take you through the various workflows we Ed to turn 2D Maps into realistic 3D terrains for creating beautiful renders and 3D principal objects the type of workflow you will use will depend on what your starting point is and how close to an existing map you want the results to be are you looking to start your world building Journey or do you have an established world that you looking to replicate precisely maybe you have the land masses planned out but not the details for this tutorial there's a few pieces of software that we'll be using I'll link the links in the description to all of these um but we'll be using guia and blender to create these uh realistic looking terrains and in order to create the inputs that we need for these uh programs I'll look at two different workflows one using wonderdraft if if you're a wonderdraft user and then if you're not an alternative using Photoshop here you can see a side by-side image of the original and 3D version of barovia this map has contour lines which we can take advantage of with a lot of tracing in Photoshop get something very close to uh the original map what these different approaches have in common is Crea creting a rough height map to use as input into Gaia a height map is essentially just a grayscale image with low elevation represented by darker Grays through to Black and high elevation represented by lighter Shades once we've run this through guia the output will be something like this uh where we can see much more detail from the erosion here's another example this time it's a world map um as a side note I really enjoyed working on this commission uh it's such a cool idea to have these large land masses floating in the sky um if you're interested in reaching out for a commission I'll leave a link in the description but this time as you can see from the the starting map we don't have any 2D Contours to trace only symbols and therefore we're going to have to do a lot more kind of thinking and manual interpretation um of the elevation changes so in this video video I'm going to start with uh the easiest workflow and the one that I think gives the best results if you're starting out building your world in an ideal situation you would start with just a fairly basic um flat landscape uh without the details already added like the mountains and the rivers uh and then produce these fully procedurally this this is what will give you the most realistic results so if I quickly uh hop over to uh guia very quickly um you can see here that um we have this flat starting point um we can add in some noise and I'll go through this uh later on and how to do this in more detail but essentially by just adding the noise then uh simulating the erosion then simulating the the rivers through this eroded landscape just look how they seem to kind of navigate the the terrain as you would expect uh rivers to do naturally um even with like little Headwaters feeding into the the the main river here then eventually out to the Sea that's not there just yet um but you can see how having this created for you rather than trying to trace something that's already there is a much preferable workflow um it's not the end of the world if you already have a map with rivers exactly where you want them we we have uh a workflow for that too um but this kind of gives you the the nicest results um and same goes for the kind of the the coastline and then simulating where the the trees would uh form as well um but getting ahead of myself here with with uh Gia um I wanted to first take a look at uh Wonder draft now here I've uh got a map already um but uh let's just uh let's just discard this actually and create a new one from scratch so a really key thing here for for starting with a new map in Wonder draft um is to make sure you're working uh with square uh aspect ratio one: one aspect ratio and here I've CH 40 uh 4096 by 496 as this is going to match um the output render or height map render from from guia later on um so we load up a a completely new map uh I'm just going to go to the land mass wizard select a continent and generate and here we can see that we've got this land mass created with the water around and in Wonder draft you can uh affect the water level to kind of allow the the land mass to kind of grow and Shrink away like this um but the important thing to note here is that um the actual height map here doesn't include the water so we've got kind of information all the way down here from 0.01 uh this is the you the lowest area is all the way up to one and we can see that there's actually a fair bit amount of um land mass still remaining at one and we will see that later in guia as a kind of a flat spot on top of um the terrain um but really what this is doing is essentially taking a a slice through the the land at any given height um so you'll want to find something that's uh going to be interesting to you um quite like this actually there's a couple of s of interesting shape around here plus a couple of islands um the important thing is to take note of the water level so here we've got 33 uh and then we're going to export this um so you go to export and under image select height map and uh we'll overwrite T2 there and once that's exported we can go over to uh Gia um I'm going to start a new terrain um guia is really nice uh this I really like this uh new interface so this is guia 2 I should say it's only recently released and therefore there's a few things that aren't quite working as expected still uh but we've got some work arounds so the first thing is uh we take go to primitive assets and then file and then we just need to find that height map we just created and then you can see this rather uh dramatic looking uh 3D um object um here's that that um land mass that flat spot that I mentioned uh when we were in wonderdraft so this is really quite undesirable um for when we're going to erode the terrain later because that will show us a flat spot um the first thing that we want to do is to have that kind of water level [Music] introduced now we should and maybe when you're watching this video uh you will be able to do this we should be able to add in an effects node so if you drag out brings up this um search bar here it's we want this adjust node uh you can just type FX FX uh to bring that in as well um we should be able to clip this I think uh but at the time of recording this really just doesn't seem to do anything um but it's not a problem we can uh instead use a c node get a kind of similar effect um for the scale of this terrain um I'm going to turn Coastal erosion off um I don't really want to to have the these beaches um especially if we're going to claim that this is an entire continent um and while I'm thinking of it actually um scale is is interesting when you're creating these uh 3D realistic terrains I tend to go for uh an overemphasized uh scale on the height uh particularly for when I'm 3D printing terrains um because at a at a whole continent scale this would essentially just be flat anyway so it just makes it more visually appealing in my eye um you can uh go ahead as as uh you know what what looks good for your map um right so I said it was important to remember the water level and then I forgot uh so 33 we're just going to set this level uh to roughly the same so 33 here we have what would be exactly the same so if I just click this button here we can bring the 2D view Port then as I go back to wonder draft bring that over here you can see from this top down view we've got something that looks um pretty much spot on including these two little Islands here these two islands over to the left here um because we're going to be eroding this terrain I'm actually going to just drop this down just a tad just just to reveal a bit more of the uh of the land mass to give it a bit more bulk and and that's just going to help uh make our 3D version more consistent from as a top down view with our final um with with the 2D input version okay at this point I want to just jump into Photoshop um just in case you um want to have a starting point that is not uh from W draft let's say you've just got a 2D image of your map um the rest of the workflow after this point will will be the same but um just to give you an an option um if you are not starting from Wonder draft but you still want to um just have the the general land masses I I will use this example in a future video um if you do want to accurately Trace all of the the mountains and the water features that you have in your 2D map um but that has quite a different workflow in guire as well um however if you do want to just start off with the land masses then you can start follow the a similar workflow in guia um from a 2d map um so essentially um again we need to have this as a square input um so in Photoshop at least and I imagine you you can do the same sort of workflow with a a free alternative like um but you want to go to image and change the canvas size uh here it's quite a high resolution image of this map we want to take this width and make the height the same um I find it easier for Downstream processing if we kind of uh set the anchor to the top so this is just going to when I hit okay it's just going to expand um the map downwards so when we load this into guia um what you'll see is obviously a lot of that kind of square that you load up will just be blank um and and we'll just be working with a a smaller portion of the square um but then later on down down the line we can um change the dimensions of of the 3D object uh once we're in blender um so I find it easiest to make use of of layers here um so remember with the height map we want uh basically a a dark color for the lower altitude areas and a lighter color for the higher altitude areas and because we can rescale um once we're in guia I'm just going to use going to create a a solid color layer um and this is going to be the land so we'll just go for quite a light value this automatically creates a mask um currently this is showing this everywhere but we want to click on the mask and then invert that so we can now see our map again uh and then this uh sort of magnetic nasso Tool uh this is what I've been finding uh the easiest way to kind of Select these objects um it will take quite a while to do this entire map so I'm just going to do this island here um and uh this step will be easier if you um have a version without kind of the the the letters and the symbols but if that's not possible it's not too much of a problem so we can can just click once and then just move your mouse around um tracing the edges and then what I tend to do if there is some text overhanging I'll click to just make sure that I've got a um Anchor Point and then just uh follow it around um I'm going to do this fairly roughly um you can see it still does quite a good job this I guess is dependent on you know the contrast between the sort of your your land mass and your uh water let's just do this quite quickly because you'll get the idea um just tracing this around and then when you get to here you can close the loop and this now this section will be be selected and then making sure that on the layers we've got the mask selected see everywhere that's black um will represent um kind of its transparent and we want to make this white so just click uh this Paint Bucket symbol select white and now you can see um that this is all filled in I've not done a perfect job but it's okay okay um now this is showing white here right now not because I filled it with white uh that's actually just affecting the mask so this is why I quite like working with layers if you need to kind of update this at any point later on you can select your color um I'm not going to do the whole map but if you kind of continue that sort of workflow uh adding the the rest of your your land uh you can then uh right click duplicate layer we can call this other layer c um and then just uh invert the mask there and of course uh we also want to change this to a dark color for the height map so you'll have essentially a um black and white image at this point export this as a PNG and then import that into Gaia as your um height map instead of the one we created from Wonder draft it will automatically be flat because we don't have any variation of color in here at this point um but then you can just rescale as before okay this still is far too tall so the next thing to do is to drag from this out node we're just going to add another adjust node um and we're going to clamp this right down I want to click drop to drop it to the floor so this goes right down um another thing we want to do because of this uh flat spot here and I guess just to give us a bit more control over um the sort of overall elevation changes that are happening throughout um throughout the terrain I'm actually going to uh click auto level and equalize and what this is doing is essentially making this flat on top uh oh strong as well there we go now it's perfectly flat um and I'm just going to clamp this down even more um if you have it too high up you end up with huge Cliffs all the way around your Coastline and we don't want that um so the next thing to do is to introduce um some something some interest uh to the terrain so I'm going to do this with another primitive so we go to basic and then I'm going to add a pearing primitive we can see here that this texture actually looks quite similar to what we had um um in in Wonder draft um this kind of random noise is probably what the uh uh the wizard uh is is is creating in the the land mass wizard um there is also a land mass brush um where you have brush marks you'll often see instead of this kind of rough uh looking um terrain you you'll have just complete flat spots again wherever the brush was that's not an issue because this step will make everything flat anyway so you you know feel free to um kind of paint your terrain how you want it to be in wraft okay next we want to update the settings for this pein node um I think from my testing I quite liked the the rid uh variant and I think taking the scale right down just to to kind of get as much going on here as we can um this is something that we can update in a in a moment and we'll be able to see what it's doing a bit more easily um so we're going to combine this with uh the effects node so you need to drag from the out of the effects node into the out node of the pein node and then we end up with something looking like this um we want to set it to add and the ratio up to one and you can see right now we have kind of sort of mess everywhere this is not what we want so what we want to do is mask this by adding in a height node just clear this up a bit um and just going to take this full off right off right down and then just take the range up a bit so you can see here that it kind of gives you the same value wherever you're going here but that's because um the the object that we're looking at obviously has flat sides there um so just put that down here and so this is now creating a mask so everything that's uh White has been selected and everything that's uh black is not selected um so we'll feed this into the mask uh and yeah we have something now that's uh looking quite dramatic but we're going to scale this down now um so these little buttons along the the bottom of lot a lot of these nodes uh allow you to do some controls so um so two things we'll probably want to do here is height remap and shaper um so for the shaper this is kind of affecting the heights of the sort of high points low points in a in a different way um let me just take this down and it will be a bit more obvious um so this is going to help us create more elevation changes in the terrain um so if I now pull this down like this uh you can see that actually we're getting some high peaks and in fact perhaps this is a bit uh overly emphasized so if that's the case you need to just turn the shaper up a little bit and then height remap down a little bit um get what feels right for you um I think this looks okay for now we can come back and change this um and of course um you know if if this sort of generally looks right for you but you don't like the exactly out of the mountains for example just go back to this pearing mode and you can select a different random seed uh it would just mix this up and then when you combine it um the sort of higher areas will be in a different place okay um I think we'll leave part one of this tutorial series here um I really just wanted to get to a stage where whether you've started from wonderdraft or um having to use Photoshop with an existing image of a map to get to this stage where we've got the kind of the main land mass uh prepared and you know we can already start to look at kind of the the interesting features here and start to think of the the effects on World building you know the sort of separation of this kind of mountain range here um there like this nice land bridge um through to this island here perhaps this is a key area of defense um but uh yeah in in the future in the next video um we'll take a look at uh starting to erode this terrain and um get this through to the point where we can get this into blender and then um create a a 3D principle object um from this uh starting point so I hope you enjoyed this video uh if you did please leave a like and uh subscribe for uh future videos and updates where I can take us through creating the the the textures um the nice rendered images um and also following the the more complicated workflow of um if you have a home brew world where you really want to place every mountain and river in in exactly the right place um but for now I'll see you in the next video