Real World Mountain elevation data

[Jay-Nicolas]

Hey guys!

Long time lurker... recent poster... Love the site, I've just never been able to get a map going that I really wanted to pursue... There was always something with the way that mountains, and mountain rangers were rendered...

I was so tired of my mountains looking like mounds... Or piles of dirt, when real world mountains have water erosion like this:



Well... I decided I had to have real world mountains. So I went and found a tutorial ( here ) that showed me how to export height maps from google earth. (I found the usgs site very unfriendly...)

Once I got some nice dense mountains into photoshop, I spent most of the day creating a tileable (that is: seamless edges) realworld mountain texture.

Then, I defined it as a pattern in photoshop, and painted this pattern on a new layer with a blend mode of screen, overtop of my original export from Fractal Terrains.

My original image with the "mounds" of mountains was this:


And with about 2 minutes of painting, I was able to turn it into this:



I was so happy, I decided I'd share it with the class!
So... you can download the full tileable mountain image
RIGHT HERE!
(graciously stored on forum.cartographersguild.com!!)

I hope you all find it useful. Feel free to use it at your leisure. The only thing I ask is that you give credit where credit is due

Thanks!!
-Jay-Nic