Pictures of Revelstone

[Revan]

"MY LIFE HAS NO MEANING!"

And you only just figured that out?

[aTOMiC]

After fooling around with some of the software that has been suggested in this thread I thought I'd upload what I've managed this evening. It is crude but there are hundreds of important details that can be added and changed with some of these software packages. I can't wait to dig in and see my vision of Revelstone fully realized.
kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/album_view.php?id=287

[Mystikan]

It's great to see people finding the Terragen links useful, great pic too Tom! I think we've got the idea of the walls angling towards the front tower from the main body.
I took amanibhavam's comments to heart and created a more "natural" looking version. I'm playing around with map compositing here to create structures within the landscape itself - pure Terragen render, no Cinema4D or post-processing. Still need to play about a bit with it though - anyway, here's the prelim:

[aTOMiC]

That is a very cool picture, Mystikan. I haven’t had much time to devote to working on my ideas lately. I’m using Bryce now exclusively. Becoming comfortable manipulating the surface features is taking more than an evening to master. My aim has been to create a natural and mountainous plateau that tapers to a cliff face. From the descriptions in the book I believe Revelstone’s walls extend outward toward the tower and the gates. I suspect the walls are either curved or have multiple angles unlike the triangle formation I managed the other day. After having worked in Terragen for a while I’m impressed that you were able to create the walls and parapets in your picture just using that software. I attempted such things but I must have been missing something critical. All I could manage was an approximation of the plateau and the river running nearby with the lake at what should have been at the bottom of the waterfall. It has been a fun challenge trying to create the Revelstone that has only existed in my imagination.

[amanibhavam]

I've always pictured Revelstone to be carved right _into_ the cliff, if you know what I mean; a wedge-shaped promontory, and the chambers and corridors and everything are deep inside the gutrock of the mountain, and the outer faces od the cliff are carved so they form windows and balconies and arches and alcoves. The only separate structure from the bulk of the plateau would be the tower, wich is also shaped from a natural outcrop of the rock - much like Kevin's Watch, only shorter and much more extensively reformed - which is shorter than the cliff face itself, and is connected to it with walls on either side and catwalks in the air.
You guys make very impressive picks, but they all are separate from the wedge somehow.
I assume you have seen RoTK - the highest level of Minas Tirith, that huge wedge-shaped thing, that is something similar, only Revelstone is huuuge and contains the whole city itself.
Oh, if only I could draw...

[Durris]

I saw an unbelievable photograph the other day of a church in Lalibela, Ethiopia, that had been delved and carved out of brownish-pinkish solid rock. The outer surfaces of the rock formation remained intact around it (the top of the formation was some distance above the church's roof, and the entry courtyard was in a deep human-made cleft.) The caption said that no stairway existed, but the entry court and church door were reached only by a tunnel that also had been cut through the solid rock.

This is very much the method of construction I imagine for Revelstone as SRD describes it.

[amanibhavam]

Yes, it's impressive. Or you could take Petra in Jordan, for instance.

[Mystikan]

Tom - How I do this in Terragen is, I build the main landscape in World-Machine, starting with a hand-drawn grayscale bitmap to define the promontory and mountains in the background in Photoshop. I apply erosion and weathering filters in World-Machine to make them more natural looking. This map does not contain any of the Revelstone structures, just the natural formations. In Photoshop, I then use the gray map as a guide, Add New Layer, and on that layer I use a flat square Pencil brush to place the buildings against the edge of where I'd drawn the promontory. Then I flat-fill the gray map with black under the new layer, leaving just the squares I placed for the buildings, Flatten Image, and export as Raw without any other processing. In Terragen, I then load the World-Machine map, in Combine Landscape use Copy Existing, then I import the raw map with the squares as a landscape, and Combine them to produce the modified map with the buildings. I use a 4096x4096 map size to get the detail necessary for the crenelations (you need to register Terragen to do this though). You CAN do it on 512x512, you just don't get the fine crenelations on the tower. The colour scheme is achieved by using the SO Image Import plugin for Terragen to create a bitmask to keep the colours only on the buildings. If you like, I can email you the grayscale maps, World-Machine TMD and Terragen TER and TGW files to help you get a better grasp of the concept. If you want these, just PM me with your email and I'll send them on!

amanibhavam - I do know what you mean, and I agree about the city being carved into the cliff. I'm trying to achieve this effect with the Terragen render above, as I said it's a prelim, not a final. Getting this effect is a real prick, though - but I'll keep at it, because I know exactly what you're saying, just getting it to actually do it is a bitch! Might be a little while, I get busy sometimes and getting time is hard (not being married or having kids helps tho! ) I'll play some more with shifting the building map further into the promontory to make them look more part of the cliff, and maybe darken them up so they blend with the cliff more! I'll keep you posted!

[Glimmermere]

I'm always interested in exactly what a place looks like when I'm reading fantasy novels. So I revere a good and careful cover artist. I remember seeing one of the editions of The Power That Preserves that has that authors rendition of Revelstone. You probably have already found it, but if not, a pic of that cover can be seen online at: theland.antgear.com/covers.html

[Mystikan]

Yes, there's a couple of pictures that seem to depict Revelstone. The TPTP cover on the bottom left of that page seems to be quite artificial, with the simple square face and the round tower. There's also one on the cover of LFB (the edition with the black covers with the pictures-in-pyramids on the front) that shows a more natural-looking Revelstone carved into the cliff face, and a more ornate, intricate tower. This one seems to me to be the more "true" version - as amanibhavam has pointed out, it would look more natural than artificial, I think. But I don't think the main part would look quite as "cracked" or "canyonised" as the LFB cover, perhaps more regular and artificial but retaining at the same time, the natural colour and texture of the rock face, and following the strata layers. This is the effect I'm trying for now.

[Blue_Spawn]

I've created a picture of what I think Revelstone looks like and sent it to Jay over at the KW site, but if you don't want to wait until it's published (hopefully it will be), here's a smaller preview:

That is pretty good! What medium did you use? Was it Teraggen by any chance?

I was working on a render of Mount Thunder in Bryce a while back. I had the major landscapes done and then got bored with creating all the trees and forests -_- so, that was the end of that.

[Mystikan]

Blue Spawn: The landscape was done with World-Machine and rendered with Terragen, the building was done in Cinema4D. I've done a writeup on how I did this picture in my Gallery if you want more info. I've done a Terragen render of Mount Thunder there too!

Aaaaarrrrrgghhh, why'd you get bored ?!? You did all that work setting up the landscape and then just walked away from it? Never give up!!! I want to see it! Finish it! Pleeeeeease!

What I do, when something I'm working on becomes too onerous, is I just put it aside and go back to it later when I get my next surge of creativity. I have to discipline myself to it sometimes, but my desire to see the end result always outweighs my frustration in getting it done! To give you an idea, that picture of Revelstone actually took me three weeks to set up and render, a little bit at a time!

[Blue_Spawn]

Yes, that's what I sometimes do. Except that sometimes when I imagine how much detail I still have to put into stuff I get quickly discouraged. Oh well, I plan to finish it someday. Here's the unfinished version:

www.deviantart.com/view/6548083/

[Mystikan]

Nice pic, Blue Spawn! You're off to a great start there!

Here's a few suggestions to take off some of the work that's obviously confronting you for that scene...

I've done a number of pics that entail vast amounts of detail over a large area, as yours seems to be. Now, if you were to literally try to place thousands of detailed trees over the extent of that landscape, unless you have a computer that makes HAL look like a pocket calculator, it's not going to happen - the voxel tree, or octree (the algorithm 3D programs use to compute visibility and perspective) is going to be measured in billions of gigabytes. If your leaf sizes are equivalent to millimetres, and you're spreading trees over an area measured in hundreds of square kilometres, the memory requirement is huge. Not to mention the VAST number of polygons the program has to compute to render the scene. And not to mention the Highlander-like lifespan you'd need to be able to place all the trees! Next time you're at a lookout overlooking a sweeping view, try to picture how many cubic millimetres, or how many polygons, it would take to cover everything you see, and you'll get what I mean.

So, how to get around this problem? First, having positioned your camera and deciding where you're taking the shot from, surround only that immediate area with detailed trees. Looking at your pic, that would be just the hilltop in the foreground and the area at its base. Where you've put those trees on the left is as far as you need to go out with the detailed models, no further. Next, set up a separate project and render a few trees, one at a time, by themselves on a black background, save the pics, and crop them to the exact size of the tree on each one. In Photoshop or your favourite paint app, use the Magic Wand or Mask Select to mask out the back background, then save the mask as an alpha channel and save the pic. In your 3D program, create a flat plane and use the tree pic as a texture, using the alpha channel to create a transparency around the outline of the tree. Position and size the plane on the landscape so it's facing the camera and about the size you want for the distant tree. Do the same with different tree pics for variation. You only need about five or six different tree pics to make it look good. Copy the planes many times and scatter them about the middle distance - don't do this all the way to the horizon, it's still too much work though! Stick to placing them just on that middle headland, near the riverbanks and back a little bit. Make sure they all face the camera, too. This technique is called "billboarding" and is a common trick in this field.

You can see an example of this in my Gallery here. In this image, only the trees immediately outside the window are actual 3D models. The darker ones in the background are billboarded. Can you see the difference?

For the far distance, you have two options:
1) Post-processing with your paint app; or
2) Rendering the distant part of the landscape with a surface texture that makes it look like it's covered with trees.

I most often use post-processing as it's faster, I have more control over the final appearance, and it's less work. To post-process, render your scene with the trees and billboards in your 3D app and load the pic into your paint app. Use a Lasso Select to mask in the distant area of the landscape and exclude the foreground, rocky peak and sky. Feather the edges of the selection so it blends nicely with the rest - about 4-6 pixels feathering will do. Draw a tree in black on white in a separate pic about 48x48 pixels in size. Assign this pic as a Custom Brush, then return to your scene. In your Brush Options, set Scattering, Size Jitter, Opacity Jitter, and Hue/Saturation Jitter, choose a nice dark greenish colour from the palette, and sweep the brush over the masked area with broad strokes. Do the top (most distant) first, and work down to the bottom (closest), so the scattered trees overlie each other correctly. Increase your brush size as you work down so the trees appear to scale with distance. Experiment with the Jitter settings to get the effect you want. If you want extra realism, put the new trees on a separate layer and assign a Drop Shadow style to the layer in the direction of the lighting, so the trees appear to cast shadows.

You can see an example of this in my Gallery here. This pic of Melenkurion Skyweir was done in Terragen and the trees were post-processed in just as I've described above.

If you realize that objects in the distance don't need to be as detailed as foreground objects, and thus break your project into several stages with different techniques like this, you'll take out so much back-breaking work and you won't flood your computer's RAM and CPU. Hope this helps, and I look forward to seeing the finished pic!

[Blue_Spawn]

Thanks a lot for all your tips. I'll try to utilize them once I have the time.

Indeed, true object entities do take up a lot of space. One of my own renders, for example, took up over 1 million polygons because I had about 1200 individual grass entities in the render

[Mystikan]

Yes, that's the sort of thing I mean... 1200 grass blades wouldn't look like much, and bogs down your system. That's where you cheat!

[Warmark]

Isaw i cover of TPTP on SRD website and it is exactly how revelstone is described yet not at all how i saw it.
if you see what i mean...

[Warmark]

heh, found it on SRD webpage.

[Warmark]

heres the revelstone picture.
BUMP

[CovenantJr]

I've created a picture of what I think Revelstone looks like and sent it to Jay over at the KW site, but if you don't want to wait until it's published (hopefully it will be), here's a smaller preview:

That is pretty good! What medium did you use? Was it Teraggen by any chance?

I was working on a render of Mount Thunder in Bryce a while back. I had the major landscapes done and then got bored with creating all the trees and forests -_- so, that was the end of that.

...Well ...That isn't even remotely how I half-envisaged Revelstone. Interesting.

Warmark, thanks for the bump...but that link doesn't seem to go anywhere