The Living Labyrinth
Sketches turned into maps to visualise the plot better
6 hrs post our first conversation i sent initial ideas to understand his need. He was writing his Sci-fi novel. He needed maps. Customised to connect audience with his plot better. This is the story of a world that does not exist. Go on read the book.
“Very pretty, but accuracy is more important,” he replied.
We took a call to go with the second style that looks like white clay as it was quick and good enough for us to represent maps. The third set would’ve made good posters for the book launch event.
Soon, the conversations started to go deeper into the continental shelves. Until this point i was thinking just above the water. We needed to go deeper.
Problem:
When you have to control the coast-line, underwater-shelf and height of the mountain above water all in a single black&white map. How would you paint that depth, that height and that coast?? This level of customisation was required. Off the shelf production softwares did terrains in a random manner. You loose control.
Solution:
He wanted control on his maps. Though i was slower than those plugins which do terrains procedurally, i gave him that control.
The initial tests with shelves came out nice. But with actual maps, it didn’t. It took us a while, to get there.
Problem:
Shelves were not accurate, and hard to control
Solution:
We separated them out, combined them in layers rather than in single images. This gave us the flexibility to control them individually where necessary.
