Okay, so check it, I finally got around to messing with those Natlan map leaks I saw floating around online. Been meaning to do it for ages, just kept putting it off, you know how it is.
First thing I did, obviously, was hunt down all the supposed leaked images. There were a bunch scattered all over the place, different resolutions, some looked kinda sus, others seemed legit. Spent a solid hour just gathering them up and trying to figure out which ones were actually worth a damn. Ended up with like, 15 or so images that I thought had potential.Organized them into folders, named them stuff like “Natlan_coastline_v1” and “Natlan_volcano_concept_alt” – you get the idea.
Next up, I fired up Photoshop. My plan was to try and stitch these things together, see if I could get a rough overview of the entire region. This is where things got a little tricky. The perspectives were all over the place, the lighting was different in each image, and some of them just didn’t seem to line up no matter what I did. Ended up using the “puppet warp” tool a lot to try and adjust the perspectives and get things to match up even remotely.
After a couple of hours of fiddling, I had something that vaguely resembled a map. It was super rough, lots of gaps and blurry bits, but you could definitely see some of the main features – a big volcano, some kind of jungle area, and a sprawling coastline.I then started using the clone stamp tool to fill in some of the obvious gaps, pulling textures and patterns from other parts of the images. It was a painstaking process, but it helped to make the map look a little more coherent.
I wasn’t happy with just a flat image, though. I wanted to get a sense of the scale of the region, so I decided to try and create a rudimentary 3D model. Exported my stitched-together map as a displacement map in Blender. Messed around with the settings for a while until I got something that looked vaguely like a real landscape. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a better idea of how the different areas connected to each other vertically.
Then I was like, “Screw it, let’s try putting this into Unity.” I’ve been playing around with Unity for a while, making little prototypes and stuff. Imported the 3D model, added some basic textures and lighting, and rigged up a simple camera controller.Now I could actually walk around this janky, leaked version of Natlan. It was pretty cool, even if it was just a bunch of blurry textures and jagged polygons.
One thing I noticed while exploring my makeshift Natlan was the sheer scale of the volcano. It was way bigger than Dragonspine or even the Chasm. Got me thinking about potential gameplay mechanics, like maybe you’d have to climb it in stages, dealing with intense heat and falling rocks. Or maybe there’d be some kind of underground network of lava tubes and caves to explore.
- Gathered all the leaks
- Stitched the images in photoshop
- Made a rough 3D model in Blender
- Imported model to Unity
- Explored the map
Anyway, it was a fun little project. Probably not entirely accurate, but it was a good way to kill a few hours and get hyped for the real Natlan release. Who knows, maybe some of my predictions will actually come true. Time will tell!
