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borosphere:
Hi again. Sorry for stirring things up, I was half joking really. Ho ho. hum. Anyway, some interesting ideas here. I would agree that the terrain has stayed much the same since the Second Age, maybe more forested before Men came along and started farming. Is it possible to have overlays of some sort such that users could pick a timescale and get the correct buildings? Or tag structures with a time period? Or even animate the whole thing in geological time. :D

I think the movie terrain is more or less accurate except for the obvious things like squashing the distance between Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith, stuff like that. Great for the filmic effect but not necessary.

As to a database of references for descriptions of places, an excellent idea as it will keep things consistent. Also some templates of building styles and methods. Obviously the forum is not the place for this, how would it be implemented?

Example-
Orthanc: Tolkien went through a few designs for Orthanc, all of which were very much tower-like so maybe you're right about it being built using 'magical' skills. Here's his final sketch from HoME Vol 8 (The War Of The Ring) which pretty much corresponds with descriptions in the text. Tolkien was notorious for changing his mind so who knows?


Here are the refs:
FOTR Book II Ch.2 Gandalf's description. "But Isengard is a circle of sheer rocks that enclose a valley as with a wall, and in the midst of that valley is a tower of stone called Orthanc... made by the Men of Numenor...yet it looks not to be a work of craft."

TTT Book I Chapters 8 and 10 have the best descriptions, and also the changes that Saruman made.
If you set up a database let me know and I'll start stuffing it. Page references are no good as everyone will have different editions, or none at all, so Volume, Book and Chapter are enough, perhaps paragraph which are separated by blank lines and seem to be consistent across editions. Although there are plenty of sites with descriptions of named places I don't know of any which focus on the architectural so it would be very useful.

monks:
Hey borosphere- nowt wrong with stirring things up every once in a while. It's very easy to overlook obvious things. And present company can only do so much!

 I had a dream last night and I had this huge black ring binder folder. In it was apparently the contents of this project. Then it was outside in the street on the road and I thought to myself hmm really should bring that in...then I saw the binder empty and I was walking past what looked like a school yard, and there were white pieces of paper everywhere, thw wind was blowing and ocassional pieces would float high in the air past me. Strangely however most of the pieces were all bundled in small stacks which I found could be scooped up intact. I figured it would take half an hour to gather them. That's when I woke up. LOL  ;D

 The overlays is a good idea. Skystrider (jeremey) is the person to speak to about that as he does the online map, but for its implementation it would need some..ermm...buildings. Things are a bit slow here at the moment but don't let that fool ya...we've had many periods of transition. I'm currently learning 3DS Max- hence why the next terrain release has been temporarily put on hold. I'll have the skills soon to start preparing the sites from map resources, and modelling buildings. The idea is to first block out really basic sites (probably via extrusion of a topo map in Max) and then folks will have a much better idea of what's needed.


 "As to a database of references for descriptions of places, an excellent idea as it will keep things consistent."

 I think Haerengil has a very good starting point for it. Maybe he'd be interested in helping us out, collating and curating this stuff?
 http://worlds.outercraft.com/forum/index.php/topic,20.msg98.html#new

 Building styles is an important one...I dismantled into architectural components a building model donated to us. I think the guy who modelled it based his MT on the films.

 Yes, I've got a couple of books on Tolkien's art. I don't have all of the HOME series though- I only bought 3 of them which I knew I needed for some reading into a subject I was doing. Vol 8 ordered now :-D There is another possibility for Orthanc. There's an article on the old me-dem boards but it's no longer accessable- but I can stll get to it from the admin login. Here's the entry:

Isengard and Orthanc

To the centre all the roads ran between their chains. There stood a tower of marvellous shape. It was fashioned by the builders of old, who smoothed the Ring of Isengard, and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills. A peak and isle of rock it was. black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one, but near the summit they opened into gaping horns. their pinnacles sharp as the points of spears, keen-edged as knives. Between them was a narrow space, and there upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain. This was Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, the name of which had (by design or chance) a twofold meaning; for in the Elvish speech orthanc signifies Mount Fang, but in the language of the Mark of old the Cunning Mind.

 The drawings which most closely resemble the final conception in the text are Isengard & Orthanc, plate 164, p 168 J.R.R Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. And of course the illustration on the dust jacket designs for The Two Towers.
  Isengard’s black rocks and topography suggest that it is a huge volcanic crater [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_crater]; Orthanc itself could have been an aiguille (a column of solidified felsic (felsic is a term used in geology to refer to silicate minerals, magmas, and rocks which are enriched in the lighter elements such as silica, oxygen, aluminium, sodium, and potassium.) lava expelled from the vent [http://www.decadevolcano.net/photos/keywords/vent.htm]during the last eruptions) [http://www.terragalleria.com/mountain/mountain-image.alps3514.html]. This was found by the Numenoreans and shaped by hands or magic into the tower of Orthanc.

Tolkien’s description is reminiscent of  the volcanic spire produced during the eruption in the Etang Sec crater of Mont Pelee, [http://www.mount-pelee.com/index.php/content/view/22/30/1/2/lang,en/
]Martinique [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pelee]

In October [1902], a lava dome began to rise out of the crater floor. It grew for a solid year into a gigantic shaft in the form of an obelisk. It has been described by many as the most spectacular lava dome produced in historic times. It was 350 to 500 feet thick at its base and it soared to over 1000 feet above the base of the crater floor. It sometimes rose at a remarkable rate, up to 50 ft/day. The huge spine of lava became known as the "Tower of Pelée." At night the sides of this magnificent monolith was marked by traces of red incandescent cracks from the still hot lava in its interior.
At its maximum size, the Tower of Pelée was twice the height of the Washington Monument and equal in volume to the Great Pyramid (Cheops) of Egypt. It finally became unstable and collapsed into a pile of rubble in March 1903, after 11 months of growth. No geologist had ever witnessed the emergence of such an object before.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkx984yOFz1qzs3iqo1_500.jpg



Maybe the Numenoreans crafted Orthanc from what was already there....

monks

Redrobes:
This is all interesting stuff. With Orthanc a good discussion is probably needed and then either we get to some consensus or we produce a model per consensus group and you pick one. Personally I think it needs to be more than a totally natural spire. If a powerful wizard were to live in it then it would have been hollowed out inside which makes it likely that they would have fashioned the outside to some extent too. It may have started out as a natural feature tho.

I don't think were going to be able to get Outerra to phase through timelines of models so I think we have to get people to install the models they like from a collection / data base. Outerra's capabilities are not up to us MeDem-ers and I would imagine that a timeline feature would be extremely low on the feature priority for them.

What we really need is a wiki for the book references. However, whilst setting up a wiki is not a huge problem, allowing all members to edit it and yet at the same time only allow non certified knob ends to edit it is the problem. Its a huge moderation issue that you need an army of moderator bots and / or lots of willing volunteers to accomplish. So I think a wiki is out and that we have to do this by threads on this forums.

It would be good to have a map where we can do links to the threads of the place options being discussed / worked on. Ideally we could do with a rough 3D template model for every place and then more detailed versions could be picked up and worked on. The template should just set out the generally size and shape so we could fix up the base terrain so that when a high res model comes into being it has a place to sit on that makes it fit.

And yeah, I am also somewhat tied up at the mo and for some time I expect. I think we will get some discussion done over this week / next week reviewing what we have done and where its going. But we have had some long periods where not a lot gets done then it kicks off again for another bout of activity. We have likened this to climbing up some sheer face where we reach a plateau and have a push to get there then a long rest before setting off for the next one. My personal want for the next stage is for when Outerra gets programmable biomes since we have a lot of stuff done in that respect waiting for the 3D engine to make use of it. But Outerra can already do 3D models so its just up to any of us to make it and they could go in right now. I would like to see rough untextured models going in many places first before seeing one highly detailed model but I think we would take whatever we can get. But if I am going to do some modelling then I would start knocking out the rough ones and let people pick them up and improve them.

monks:
...I thought I misread that at first...knob ends lol...could we incorporate this into what Haerengil has going over there? It is worth asking him? Perhaps we need something more focussed on the project, dunno. I think Haerengil's wiki could easily incorporate this stuff in theory.

 Yeh biomes will make one hell of a difference. Took half an hour out to tool around  ;D Model courtesy off Samuel Butler from Google Warehouse.


http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372277586.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372277628.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372277881.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372278084.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372278176.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372278273.jpg
http://skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/NASARun/2011/Screens/Orthanc/screen_1372278571.jpg

monks

jvangeld:
Wait, you just put a model of Orthanc in Outerra, just like that?

Which brings us to the fact that most of the existing 3D models are based on PJ's world, rather than Tolkien's.  And I think that is okay.  At least for LotR.  Jury is still out on The Hobbit.  As long as we place the models where Tolkien would have placed them, it should be okay, and it will save us a ton of effort for now.  One of PJ's worst errors was making Middle Earth too small, but that is more of a plot-pacing error than a geographical one (http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-first-hobbit-film-some-thoughts.html)

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