Rivers and Pools <em>The past couple of weeks have been all about landscaping, it has been quite a challenge but I think I’m getting there</em>
If I’m being honest I’ve been putting off doing the detailed landscaping of the Vale of Araluen for a while - mainly because I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the scale of the task. In my previous life as a design engineer I modelled a lot of pretty technical things over the years that had to be better than millimetre perfect with zero margin for error and the thought of trying to get an entire landscape to work has been providing more than a little food for my procrastination gremlins!
So in a bid to put them back in their cages where they most definitely belong I did a bit of scribbling to try and figure out a few more specifics of the world layout. The result of said scribblings can be found below - I apologise for my terrible handwriting, I can barely read it myself but it made sense at the time!
Thea’s landscaping scribblings and notes
Tasklist
My plan for this two week block was to get the initial modelling done for;
The two rivers either side of the castle
The additional tiers in the Fairy Falls
The driveway
The forest to the right of the castle (as you look at it in my scribble image).
Essentially translating my scribbles into a 3D model so I could begin mapping it out, refining the different levels and then work out how to do all the various transitions.
Moln River (left of the castle) and Monet River (right of the castle)
Rivers
Although the rivers aren’t modelled on any particular ones - I was definitely thinking about all the lovely walks Graham, the Woofles and I have enjoyed together over the years. We’ve found some truly beautiful rivers deep in the wilds with crystal clear cool water. Many a time we’ve taken our shoes off and wadded in to enjoy the feel and sounds of the running water rushing by. Alfie wasn’t very keen though, he never liked getting his paws wet. He could always be counted on to find us the driest possible path.
I thought the rivers were going to be the easiest task on my list so I decided to start with them to get an easy win. Oh how wrong I was! They proved to be a lot harder than I thought and required a lot of tutorial watching and forum post reading to try and figure out how to build them the way I wanted to. The stumbling blocks were;
1) How to create a smooth surface that swept normal to a wiggling curve so I didn’t have any weird kinks and odd angles so I could create a nice flowing shape.
2) How to vary the width of the surface at various points along the length. I didn’t want the river to only be one width, a real river is always changing thickness depending on what it flows through and how fast that flow is.
3) Ensuring that the construction method made it possible to modify the path and shape pretty easily without having to do a load of manual tweaks to chase the shape through. I wasn’t exactly sure about where I wanted the rivers to run, so I wanted to be able to tweak and play with the path and shape.
All of these meant that simply extruding a ribbon wasn’t going to be the right route. In the design software I’d used as an engineer I would have drawn the rivers using a lofted surface with profile sections and guide curves, so I set about trying to figure out how to do this in Blender. I eventually found a very good tutorial by Erindale which walks you through how to build lofted surfaces in various different ways with geometry nodes, which was exactly what I had been looking for. Now be warned there is a bit of matrix algebra involved in the more advanced techniques, but Erindale explains it really well and even though I was really not good at matrix algebra at uni I understood it, so I’m sure most people will be totally fine with it.
This method worked really well and satisfied all my criteria. I’m really quite pleased with how the rivers are looking at the moment and how easy it was to pull the curves around to get the shape I wanted. I actually ended up using the same method to draw the driveway which meant I ticked that task off the list quite quickly. The riverbanks however are still a work in progress as they have been proving to be very tricky, I’ve tried a lot of different ways of drawing them but I haven’t managed to get them to look quite right yet. In an artistic strop one evening I decided to ignore them for a bit and instead concentrate on the tiers of the fairy falls and come back to the them later. Hopefully I’ll figure it out, but if anymore has an ideas they would be much appreciated, let me know in the comments.
Fairy Falls - now with three tiers
Fairy Falls
So I moved on to working on adding the other levels of the fairy falls which thankfully proved to be easier than I thought they would be. One of the aspects that had been proving tricky was how to get the river to run into and out of the pools nicely. But I realised while I was creating the rivers that I could once again use the geometry node lofted surface method, which was nice. Then it was a case of arranging a lot of rocks and trying to work out the levels, the latter is still a work in progress. I’m hoping as I fill in more and more areas I’ll gradually be able to figure it all out!
This area of the landscape is inspired by Monet’s garden at Giverny and the Fairy Pools we found while hiking on the Isle of Skye. The materials and textures I’ve used at the moment are all just first pass stuff to help with visualisation.
Learning how to do lofted surfaces proved to be extremely useful and a technique I’d definitely recommend having a go at if you want to build this sort of landscape. I ended up using it for everything on my list apart from the section of forest beyond the fairy falls and I’m sure it will come in handy for lots of other elements of this world build.
Parterre Garden
Given the fairy fall tiers turned out to be more straight forward than expected I started the next item on my huge list which was to begin looking into how to create a simple parterre formal garden. I came across the Gardener Plugin for Blender, but me being me I want to try and figure out how to create my own hedges and plants. So that’s going to be my next challenge. I’m hoping I can work it out from the trees I’ve already built.
Thank you for reading,
