Unnamed Topographical Map

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

Again, this map represents my latest attempts to improve my cartography skills (in the rendering of realistic topography), which I'd like to master before delving into a serious project.

If you like this new algorithm, or if you believe it's an improvement over my previous work, please let me know.

Peter

Keanu.png

[QED42]

Those are some really nice mountain and hill shapes for sure.

[waldronate]

It's hard to say much about it without a scale. At first glance it looks like it might be a plausible terrain, but things start looking mechanical pretty quickly.

+ The use of an EDM to get the basic terrain altitudes that are then eroded is fairly obvious by the spines going exactly down the centers of the land areas between water areas (there are a couple of exceptions where you edited things before erosion on the edges, it looks like). Most landscapes here on Earth tend to be more variable.
+ There is a strange bubbly character to the landscape under the erosion that strikes me as not quite right. It looks like too much white noise that got scaled up.
+ There is a blockiness to the coastline that's definitely unnatural (it looks like you scaled up from a lower resolution without a little bit of fluvial erosion or had an unfortunate encounter with a morphological filter at the last instant).

I recommend viewing the basic height field in 3D if at all possible. There are many features that look semi-plausible on an hill-shaded hypsographic-tinted map that will be immediately obvious when viewed in three dimensions.

What are you using to generate this terrain?

[Peter Toth]

Thank you QED42 and Waldronate for responding.

Ironically, I used Wilbur to create this terrain, and now that you mention it, I see the obvious flaw in my "perfectly symmetric" mountains. I believe my mistake was using the "mound" feature a bit carelessly or forgetting to impart some random fractal noise afterwards to create a more realistic asymmetry in the terrain. And I'm just about to follow your suggestion and use Wilbur to view my terrain in 3D.

Thanks again for your valuable feedback. I aim to use it to improve my methods and create a more realistic map the next time around.

[waldronate]

I think that I may have mentioned this before, but some of the discussion on https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...t=33087&page=2 may be of interest if you haven't seen it (this discussion is separate from but related to the "fun with Wilbur" discussions at https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=29412 ).

The biggest thing about your last few maps is the jagged rectangular areas along the coasts. You should probably give a last pass of precipiton erosion if possible, even if you have to fade it mostly back out to remove the jagged edges. I've also done two separate maps to get better coastlines: one with full-detail terrain for inland areas and one that's slightly blurred to reduce artifacts. The blurred one feeds the coastline edge layer in Photoshop, but the more detailed ones feed the inland and river areas.

Wilbur also has a river-finder (Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow) that can produce a texture you can composite onto your map using an image editor. The rivers can improve plausibility of some areas, even if the overlay isn't fully opaque. This is another one of those area where having two maps can be useful: a map with a little extra basin fill/high-frequency noise/basin fill will give nice crinkly rivers that fairly closely follow the original terrain, but don't suffer from that last morphological erode that opens up the canyons into valleys and gets rid of the little blebs on the surface.

An important thing to keep in mind is that all maps are an abstraction done for a purpose. To abstract away unimportant detail (or introduce plausible detail while not detracting from the purpose of the map) is the where the real art of mapmaking comes in. Too much detail at all levels introduces visual fatigue due to clutter and makes it hard to discern the purpose of the map. Too little detail gives uninteresting maps that may not fulfill their purpose.

When you sit down to make a map, try to have a reason for why the map exists. Is it pure decoration? Is it pure navigation? Is it a record of someone's journeys? Is it a property guide for the local town or county or state or country? Knowing why the map would exist tells you what sort of thing you need to show and what the scale should be. As much as it pains me to say it, Wilbur is pretty good at making terrain backgrounds for maps and can be very useful for filling in lots of relatively unimportant details like minor mountains or rivers, but it's not much good for actual mapping because mapping has a purpose. Wilbur can really shine if used iteratively (here's a rough area, Wilbur fills in some mountain details, here's what some of that new detail means in the context of the map might mean, let Wilbur do some rivers, and out pop some useful information about ways to get to emerged mountain passes, and so on), but some human needs to apply the purpose to the map in the end. Plus, Wilbur doesn't do a lot of the useful frills like roads or labels or scales or borders.