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[sisoteuz]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here so I hope I'm posting in the right section As a challenge thrown to myself I decided to create a way to render any Dwarf Fortress worlds in Blender 2.82 based on the various maps that you can export in Legends mode. Example below from the world I play in :



The only geometry in the scene is a subdivided plane, the rest is done through textures and displacement. I created a node group with various tweaks you can play with, although the defaults should give decent results out of the box :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see you just need to plug in 3 maps generated in Legends mode: ELW map (elevation respecting water level), VEG (vegetation) and TMP (temperature), add a sun light, a HDRI of your choice and a Glare node set to Fog Glow in the compositor for a morning light effect on the icy mountains and that's it

Well.. except the little purple clouds that represents the evil areas. They are rendered using a particle system with the evil map from Legends as a texture and a Principle Volume shader.

You can download the blendfile here to play with and try with your own world.

If there is interest I could share more details on the realization.

Thanks for passing by

[Strik3r]

that is pretty cool, i was planning to do something like this myself, but it looks like you got to it first. Im currently unable to do anything that requires my GPU to do significant work, but if i ever get my new GPU i will 100% be playing with this. Maybe i'll even try to improve it, if i can.

A thing i wanted it for is to be able to zoom all the way to ground level. The displacement will probably have to be object-scale independent and it'll probably need some extra detail at that distance in the form of some extra tiny perlin noise.

[sisoteuz]

Thanks for the comment I think you could use micro-displacement technique for your idea, with something like adaptive subdivision level.

That’d be awesome if you could play with it and make improvements ! I’m not terribly happy with the resolution of the mountains and there are some dark sharp shadows because of that. However increasing the subdivision level lead to very sharp and edgy mountains which looked horrible. Maybe I’ll try to tackle that if I have some time.

Another idea I was thinking about is to use the economy maps and procedurally generate towns/villages. It requires image manipulation to make them grayscale and usable though and my challenge was to use nodes only

By the way I don’t think you need a powerful GPU as the render took like 18 seconds. It’s very lightweight so rendering on CPU would totally work.

[roseheart]

Beautiful. Anything new?

[Caz]

Looks good!