Hey everyone, I've been trying to draw my own relief maps and I'm looking for a tutorial that might help me draw more interesting and more accurate shapes for my different elevation layers. Let me know if you have any tips or know any tutorials.
Tutorials on how to draw simple relief maps?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to draw my own relief maps and I'm looking for a tutorial that might help me draw more interesting and more accurate shapes for my different elevation layers. Let me know if you have any tips or know any tutorials.
What kind of relief maps? Basic contour maps or more Swiss-style maps?
http://shadedrelief.com/ and http://www.reliefshading.com/ are both good sites to start from. https://books.google.com/books/about...d=WIYDDgAAQBAJ is still a classic in the field.
I'm aiming for something in this guy's style. I feel like if I keep it simple (5 or 6 layers) it's something I can manage drawing in GIMP
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Crimea Relief Guide Map.png
Those maps have the advantage of being real-world maps with different labels. Drawing your own is rather more difficult. I'll offer you the generic advice: water flows downhill and always crosses contour lines at right angles. If you can use a hydraulic simulator to generate rivers on a heightfield, you can posterize the resulting heightfield to get contours to use as input.
If you can live with slices of real-world data, take a look at https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ to see if it's suitable for your needs.
As with most maps, the complex part of the process is getting the label harmoniously placed on the map.
Much easier to generate a height map and then use the QGis > extract contours pipeline to get your contours. Other World Mapper has a tool for drawing them with vector. Basically, you should do it as vector if you're going to hand-do them.
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Ok that makes a lot of sense, thanks!.
For reference, this is where I'm at so far. As you can see I've got the island of the Hierojord up to what I feel like is a pretty acceptable level. I'm going to keep testing brush motions and shapes to compound into elevation ranges on the smaller features. Then when I feel like I understand how to shape things respectably, I'll attempt a larger mountain range or a complex highland.
Screen Shot 2022-07-13 at 12.35.57 PM.png
This is how I do them:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post296662
Hope it helps.
This is very helpful, thanks!
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