Vanaheim (WIP)

[Hawksguard]

As we say in worldbuilding, your world, your rules! One small suggestion might be to try changing the direction of the light for your shaded relief. Currently it comes from the bottom of the map (south), which is rather unusual and can make topography look "upside down" or inverted- this is partly how I caught on to the source of the topography. I would recommend changing it so that it comes from the upper left, which is the usual angle for topographic maps. If you're working with DEM data that should be possible, though I don't know exactly what your technique is (and don't know enough about Photoshop anyway).

I do see what you mean about the light angle being somewhat unusual...unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about that. The various images I used as a starting point for this map were from already-rendered (and very large) 100-meter resolution raster images and not from actual DEM data. In fact, I wasn't even able to find anything with just the relief. I wound up having to do some manipulation of several layers in Photoshop in order to get the relief to pop out. But I needed a relief-only layer as one of the top-most layers in my photoshop file, since I had done so much editing, recoloring and outright painting over the layers below it.

I had tried several approaches before going the all-raster route, but was repeatedly stonewalled by technical issues along the way. When working with DEM data I found it either far too low in resolution for the scale I wanted to depict, or when the resolution was high enough, it was impossible to stitch so many small regions together into a single seamless image. The raster data I had wasn't of much use, unfortunately, as it wasn't accurate enough to generate heightmaps that could generate realistic relief. I had two images to choose from, but one was a sliced-elevation map, which produced nothing but huge terraces. The other one I had at first seemed very promising but I soon discovered the image had been unusually dithered, resulting in an annoying layer of relief 'static' across the entire image I wasn't able to get rid of. Very frustrating. For a while, I even flirted with the idea of doing the map rendered in 3D since the elevation was still smooth enough (attached is a 'quick' early draft I did, exploring to see if the idea was feasible). I'm still looking at that as a possibility somewhere down the road if I can work out some of the kinks in the process.

File size limitations also became an issue, as they quickly ballooned up into something that neither my computer nor the programs I was using could handle, which is why the project got put on the back burner for a while. But last summer I got a new computer and this past spring expanded the ram in it and it's tearing through stuff my old computer would choke on before.