I have spent weeks trying to get the terrain correct. I have gone from being underwater, to being way too high. I am still not entirely pleased with how the terrain looks, but it is recognizable (to me, anyway) as El Cerrito.
It is very difficult to create the isolated feeling of the actual village while at the same time trying to make it fit in with our adjacent neighbors. Where they are wanting an oceanic view off their beaches, I am supplying them with views of 6000 foot mesas.
Hopefully I will be able to overcome the "isolation vs neighboring view" problems with some textured gigantic prims. We will see how it goes.
For now, I am satisfied with the elevation of the terrain, although the texturing of the estate is a whole other ballgame. But I will toy with that later. I learned a lot throughout the entire process of making the height map. I am now very comfortable working in different channels in photoshop, whereas before, I could only work within layers. I also have gained some understanding of how 3-D simulation can use gray scale images to map terrain. I have a feeling that I will be touching up the terrain map many more times before it is all finished.
I wanted to see how the village would fit within my terrain. So, I have laid out the roads of the village and am beginning to build the 4 buildings I want to concentrate on. The first building will be the schoolhouse, which is central to why I started going out to El Cerrito to begin with. Dr. Nostrand has been rebuilding the actual schoolhouse for the past several years using traditional methods. This is one of the projects that the field school students work on while they are out there. It will be interesting to see how the online build compares to the real-life build.
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