A Pixelated World

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Some recent posts showing off an interesting method for making abstract looking art:

Making Colorful Abstract with X-particle in C4D from albehany on Vimeo.

has inspired others to show off similar techniques with different 3D applications. One example was put up in the Lightwiki Facebook Group, for use in Newtek's Lightwave3D, and from that I played around with the setup to make a pixelated map of the Pathfinder world of Golarion:

This produced some interesting results with just the quick change of a couple of nodes in the setup (One that controls the color surface and one that controls the stretching of the instances covering the map).

To change things up a bit the image stretching the heights of the beams was changed to be a greyscale image where the ocean was blacked to flatten them completely and the rest of the world was played with to try and cause the mountainous areas to be tall blocks with the lowlands being generally shorter.

From that test I set the camera flying around a bit to see how well it looks as the view gets closer. Aside from a the long time to render (12 hours to do 360 frames), the results were very nice.

It's a pretty short video. I'd like to take this to the next step and go from the flat map back onto a sphere and see if more options can be done to animate the results. At the very least I hope this inspires others to see what they can do.