Hello from Germany!

[J.M.]

My name is Johannes (that's what the J. stands for) and from your average cartographer's point of view, I'm a newbie in cartography. At last I got used to make "political" maps (only cities, towns, borders, rivers, sea and text) with Adobe Illustrator CS4. I tried to get comfortable with Wilbur but that liaison wasn't quite successful so far. Why I registered here is the huge amount of collected know-how what made me to be very astonished about you guys (and of course women!). And I need also some help, but unfortunately the quickstart guide didn't answer my questions.

I may describe my problem here: I've a political map like described as above. The places where mountains and rough height levels should be are known. I already tried to make a grey-scale height relief and imported it as a selection into Wilbur. But that didn't look very good, the edges of the height levels were sharp and thick. Because I know where the mountains have to be, I can't use a random fractal noise filter... My great question is: How do I manage to get a good topographic map? Hopefully you understood my description.

And thank you to let me share this place with you!

[Gidde]

Hi and welcome! There are about as many techniques for mountains as there are people in the guild. You may want to check out this post, though, as it sounds like it'd fit with your political map.

[J.M.]

The Swiss cartography technique is what I already had in mind. But my problem is how to get a realistic relief at all (Wilbur would be my favourite)? The tutorials at Wilbur's website don't include the case of pre-defined mountain places. I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum, so please inform me and I'll post a thread where it fits better.

[Sapiento]

Willkommen im Forum! Welcome!

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

One of the guild members, Waldronate, is the creator of Wilbur so hopefully he'll be along and be able to answer your question for you.

[J.M.]

Danke Thank you!

At the moment I'm busy looking through the guild's tutorials. Where can I start to penetrate Waldronate or any other member with my questions afterwards? In the "How-do-I"-section?

[RobA]

Danke Thank you!

At the moment I'm busy looking through the guild's tutorials. Where can I start to penetrate Waldronate or any other member with my questions afterwards? In the "How-do-I"-section?

That is as great a place as any to ask questions!

-Rob A>

[Aelyn]

Welcome It's funny to see someone who's not only living close to me but shares my initials as well! JM rocks!

[Redrobes]

Your problem with the height map is that your not using enough height resolution. If you made the image as a height map greyscale image then you have 256 levels of grey and thus 256 height levels. Wilbur and all the terrain apps use more resolution than this. Some use 16bit giving 65,000 heights or even floating point height.

If you drew your image then its likely that you used less - something like 8 or 16 colors. So you need to blur the colors to get it into the full spread of 256 and even then you get some slight bands. Within Wilbur I think there is a blur which given that the app uses 16bit or more then it should take those little steps out.

You may find that your landscape looks a bit too smooth after all this blurring but thats where you need to add noise or perform some erosion and it gets more tricky then. But if thats not a problem then getting these steps out is not so hard.

[J.M.]

Welcome It's funny to see someone who's not only living close to me but shares my initials as well! JM rocks!

Hell yeah

Your problem with the height map is that your not using enough height resolution. If you made the image as a height map greyscale image then you have 256 levels of grey and thus 256 height levels. Wilbur and all the terrain apps use more resolution than this. Some use 16bit giving 65,000 heights or even floating point height.

If you drew your image then its likely that you used less - something like 8 or 16 colors. So you need to blur the colors to get it into the full spread of 256 and even then you get some slight bands. Within Wilbur I think there is a blur which given that the app uses 16bit or more then it should take those little steps out.

You may find that your landscape looks a bit too smooth after all this blurring but thats where you need to add noise or perform some erosion and it gets more tricky then. But if thats not a problem then getting these steps out is not so hard.

THAT really brings me forward. Thank you!