I've continued my Iron Age project and narrowing the timeline down. The perfect mix of interesting architecture, culture, and cinematic conflict seems to be around the Vendel Era. This is a time that is represented by famous stories like Beowulf, Ynglingatal, and the Völsungsaga, and gold, treasures, carefully ornamented weapons, armors, and tools in archaeological findings. Sagas tell of great kings - who often did pretty strange things - and all kinds of unearthly things lurking in the shadows. The written language was the elder futhark which has survived mainly on runestones. I'd like to think that literate people wrote on materials that have not survived until today, but the general opinion is that these people did not keep a written record of events which adds another layer of mystery.

My hometown Uppsala as I imagine it about 1,500 years ago, with a bit of subjective skew to it. It is likely it was called something like Upsal (the raised hall) as there was a great hall raised on a terrace close to where the church in Gamla Uppsala is today. The picture above has at least 2 barrows behind the great hall, the west mound might not have been constructed yet.
For cinematic purposes I've exaggerated the topography somewhat because I have some ideals when it comes to camera angles, but I don't want to drive that too far since the characteristics of Uppland is the expansive landscapes. 
And yes, my poor rider is still mounted on his tired horse... Maybe he'll find hospitality down there. 

The hall is based on a reconstruction of a hall in Borg, Norway from the same era. It is about 50 meters long and I imagine some intricate decorations within the hall based on how other items usually were detailed. Can't wait to get started on that interior..  My vision of Uppsala is a planned landscape with pleasant pathways, gardens, monuments, and pastures connecting living areas. Beyond that lies deep forests and wild places visited at your own peril. 
Scandinavia is very colorful except maybe in wintertime, but then you might be surprised by some dancing northern lights, so I'm aiming not to make it gloomy by default. Unpredictable and dramatic weather will take care of that though. 

A large boat has been pulled up on shore along the river. Already in the year 98 CE Tacitus wrote what skilled seafarers the Scandinavian people were...   later some became vikings who pillaged and destroyed... anyway, it's all ancient history. 
The sea level was much higher than today since the landscape rose late after the last ice age. Back then people could travel by ship on waterways that are now barely noticeable in the landscape. I'll have these rivers run out into Mälaren in the south, so almost half the map ends naturally in the ocean. 

Planning the map is a puzzle. I'm trying to fit in a couple important places between Uppsala in the south and Vendel in the north and I would like those to be in the same map which is 4x4km. I ended up going the miniature-route where the landscape in between landmarks is squashed into a 1/8 scale version. There will be hill forts and villages everywhere, but I think this compromise is kind to player patience and still gives enough space to feel expansive.  

A funny thing happened as I am working on this thing..  I check the news the other day and see that archaeologists in Gamla Uppsala found the largest monument ever in Sweden from this time. Under the road I took to school for 10 years was a row of 150 postholes that ran for 1,000 meters. The posts would have been massive, maybe 10 meters tall, and so I had to update the scene to accommodate for even a miniature version of that..  It is pretty cool though because no one has a definite answer yet to what this was or what it looked like. So I can play around with any idea until they figure it out. For now I just sculpted poles carved with designs inspired by figurines and decorations from the time. 

More to come, stay tuned!

I'm experimenting with a couple different techniques for making vegetation. The grass worked well with having just simple standing planes intersecting one another at sharp angles and it seemed best to keep the alpha thin at ground contact. I'm making each instance pretty large to keep the draw call count down which works great on the flat terrain. The cow parsley is currently also simple planes and it is very cheap but gets skewed at certain angles. I'm playing with the idea of setting the flowers on a plane perpendicular to the stem..  

I've been hand-painting most of the vegetation based on reference images, but for the cow parsley I decided to try modeling it and projecting to my planes. I think it was actually faster then hand-painting and gave me lots of subtle lighting nuances for free. Some of that detail gets lots in-game though.. 

More to come. Maybe a cow.

I spent the past week making more trees and variations of those and setting up more organized vegetation categories for optimization purposes. The scene averages 1,5-2,5k draw calls and I'm getting around 40fps on my aging PC. That is before using any vegetation sprites, which seem a bit buggy in the SDK version I'm using (3.4.5).

It seemed like a more fun finale to this little project would be a video rather than a few simple screenshots, so I started learning the track view so I could fly a camera through the whole scene. There's is a lot more to improve but since it was just meant as a test map I hit my target and I'm ready to move on to better things.

Mood music and sounds courtesy of Fredrik Westergren.

It doesn't look like much to modern people, but during the Iron Age the hill fort is a great display of a ruler's wealth and power. A hall sits on the top of the hill protected by an inner wall. The wall has been constructed from a shingle beach and has partially collapsed over time.

At least 1,100 hill forts were built in Sweden from the Bronze Age until the end of the Viking age. They were often constructed on natural hilltops from where they have a good view over the landscape. Though it is not known exactly why they were built or for whom, it's commonly believed they were used as fortified strategic settlements, temporary refuges during wartime, or as spiritual places.

The ruins of a hill fort today is mainly just wide piles of mossy stone. Since the builders used dry masonry with often rounded rocks, only few sections of actual wall remains. I imagine that the walls were originally fairly vertical and reinforced with wooden palisades. They might have had wooden gates and enough buildings to accommodate a community.

I've roped some of the logs and I'm considering fastening the planks on the walkway with nails, but I wondering if there another way that is more resourceful.. The Iron Age builders might not have had so much metal to waste on fastenings for a palisade.

I also started a wooden bridge using the same texture.

On the trail to Herjedalen. 
First test with the rider in the scene. Still lots more assets to make and polishing to do on existing ones. The vegetation looks repeated and needs thicker types of bushes and small trees like heather and juniper. 

The project is going faster than I thought so I decided to make the whole level and try to get it pretty detailed. 
I added a norway spruce to my vegetation and started really covering the whole scene with forest. Drawcalls are a bit high, around 4k at highest settings, but that's before any optimization so Im not too worried yet. I'm starting to like my terrain layout as I'm populating the scene with more variation. I might stick with it.

 I'm eager to get the assets in fast and keep my momentum right now so I'm cranking out these meshes pretty fast. I like having a nice overview that I can squint at for a while before I get stuck in the details.

I had made this house a few months back as an art test. It is a log house of a type that was pretty common in medieval times and it can work as a placeholder in my scene until I get a chance to make another. I'll try to aim for something more Iron agey than medieval..

I also made a braided fence which was common during the iron age and up until the 11th century.
For now I'm just importing the characters as brushes, I'll look into importing skeletal meshes and animations later.

WIP of my mounted archer. No one told him a shorter bow is better for horseback archery :)
At first I thought I could get away without a belly strap for the saddle, but it just looks like it will slide right off so I'll give in and make it.. The horse is based on the North Swedish Horse which is a fairly compact draft horse. They are strong, agile and long-lived and awesome companions.  

I've decided the region will be inspired by Herjedalen in the middle of Sweden. It is mountainous and was once believed to be home to trolls, giants, and all kinds of supernatural things. 
There is also a legend about the origin of the name.

In the 9th century a Norseman called Haerjulf had to flee from Norway after killing one of the king's closest men with the king's ornate silver horn, breaking the horn against the man's skull. Thereafter he was known as Haerjulf the Hornbreaker. He came into service of the Swedish king Anund, but eloped with the king's sister and disappeared in the depths of Herjedalen. 

I like that story and it will give me something to relate to when I work so I'll stick with Herjedalen as my location. This narrows down my list of assets needed. I made a scots pine and a silver birch, both natives to the region selected for the scene. I'm hoping to make more trees soon, but the scene will have to look a bit repeated for a while. 

The forest should be old and mostly untouched. I want trees of all ages and a forest floor that is a bed of dead trees, lichen, and old moss. CryEngine can do all this and more, I have to try to get the most from it. 

After I had covered the scene with vegetation my draw calls were hitting higher numbers than I wanted. I decided to make some tree clusters that I can use to fill larger areas and save draw calls for all those unique trees I'm hoping to make. This means I have to make those parts of the terrain leveled or I'll either have floating roots or bury the detail at the roots.
 

I ran grooves for the water streams in the terrain editor and then I covered those using the river tool in tiered sections connected by the road tool with a foamy water texture. I also laid out the network of trails that will connect important landmarks.  I've also made some more changes to the terrain like dug out a small alpine lake and raised some occlusion areas in the middle of where I am planning a deep forest.  I also raised the glacier based on my colormap which made it look like a nice thick mass of ice. 

I'm not putting too much work into each asset right now, mainly just roughing out the sculpt and baking on a retopoed mesh. I like getting things into the game early on and then going back and tweaking the final asset. 
I've prepared a rock texture-overlay group in Photoshop which is easy to slide over to new PSDs so I save time when making new rock formations. I'm thinking I have triangle budget for a lot of rock variations since they average about 2-3k tris and I can usually get them down to 400tris on last LOD. 
For these rocks I use a blend layer so that I can tile a detail map of moss controlled by an opacity map. 

The Scandinavian mountains are full of huge erratic rocks dropped by the ice after the last ice age so I have to have a few of those. 

There are legends of those too - that the rocks were carried there by giants or maybe they were trolls caught in the sunlight..  So there should really be a handful of them with unique character.  

My vegetation right now has a lot of plants native to the region like cranberry, fireweed, buttercup, and the europeean blueberry. I have a long ways to go with the vegetation but it helps the overall feel to have something on the ground quickly.

Sun has set over my forest, I'm done for today. 

After being preoccupied with Unity, UDK, and other engines for a long time I've become hooked on Cryengine. If you love creating game worlds and haven't tried CE3, I highly recommend downloading the free version here- http://mycryengine.com/ 
Make your own dev account for free and you'll find answers to pretty much any questions imaginable here- http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Home - and here - http://www.crydev.net/
Since the SDK became available for free the forum has grown to a powerful resource to any developer.

I've decided to make a larger scene based around a character that I started some time ago, an adventure-type medieval archer. My plan is to make every asset custom and not use any of the assets that come with the editor. That way I'll push myself to learn the engine and make the scene entirely my own. I jump through a lot of different steps here and might fail to explain in depth everything I do. But if you have any questions I'm happy to answer!
 

My character is wearing wool pants similar to the Thorsberg trousers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorsberg_moor), leather boots and a long sleeveless shirt. He wears a heavy gambeson-like chest piece and much of his face is obscured under a dark hood made from wool. His bow is a long recurved ash self bow with bone tips and in a back-quiver he carries a dozen heavy wooden arrows. 
He lives in Scandinavia during the migration period (500AD). It happened that Germanic warriors went south to fight in the Roman army or with opposing forces and brought objects and knowledge back if they returned home. With this in mind I gave him some valuable items like the seax and quiver. The belt is nordic, he probably stole it though he says it was a gift.. Other than that I wanted his overall appearance to be pretty low class. 

If I am going to spend a lot of free time on the project I want to really love every aspect of the motif, so I'll make it heavily inspired by Sweden, my home country. I'll aim to make the scene a miniature version of a county which includes both boreal forest and bare rock above the treeline. My goal is to make the terrain for the landscape, pose my character, and make enough meshes and vegetation to populate a few screenshots. I'm fighting off some outrageous ideas bubbling of making all kinds of flora and fauna to populate an entire landscape, but for this project I'll aim lower..  

To make the heightmap and colormap for the terrain I work with 3ds Max and World Machine - if you haven't tried World Machine yet, check out the amazing tutorials on youtube. You can pick up a copy at http://www.world-machine.com/ - it's a sweet tool for simulating geomorphology. 

After a couple of test scenes it seemed this scene should be 1024x1024. That way it doesn't feel too cramped compared to a 512x512, and I can fit a small mountain range on one side and forest on the other without having to design and populate huge expanses like a 2048x2048 scene in case I want to make it a complete level later. 
  

CE3 heightmap --> World Machine-
This time I started by roughing out the level using the terrain editor in CE3. This way I can get some textures on the ground early on and get a sense of the scale between landmarks when running around in game. Once I've roughed out terrain, I export the heightmap as a BMP and can either keep sculpting finer features using Mudbox or Zbrush or directly move on to World Machine. 

In WM I'm going to use my heightmap from CE3 as a file input. For filters I add a terrace and erosion. I'm expecting the terrain to be heavily modified in CE3 so I don't go too crazy getting everything perfect in WM. I did set up a range of colors, but I use it more as a guide for when I make my color map in Photoshop.

This is the device view I ended up with.

Once I'm happy with my build I export my height map as a .PGM, my colormap in a BMP output, and export all my erosion maps as seperate BMPs using heightmap outputs. 
In my PSD I use each map (flow, deposits, wear) as alpha for a specific color and tweak them by checking on the terrain in CE3. 
To apply my heightmap I open the terrain editor and choose file/import heightmap. The height map must be the same dimensions as my terrain, in this case 1024x1024. I usually have to hit Modify/Reduce range a few times..  Now I can apply my BMP color map by going to Terrain/Import/Export terrain texture. Default tile size is 512x512, but I am going to use a 2048x2048 so I click the square and change the resolution to 2048x2048. Now I can import my color map and check it in game. 

My idea is to have three meandering water streams flowing from the mountains and merging in the left of the image. It could be a nice way to section off my different areas and I'm planning to lay out occlusion zones along the river banks. 

Here is the terrain texture after some tweaking and layer painting in CE3. The background mountains are seperate meshes, also created using WM and then retopoed. 

The terrain itself is really only a rough base because it will ultimately be pretty drowned by environment assets. There's only so much you can do in terms of shapes with the terrain and it quickly becomes apparent up close. Skyrim does a great job at building entire mountains using meshes and I'm hoping to try something similar with this map. 
For now this is a good starting point for checking my meshes.