Greetings Ye Fellow Cartographers !

[Guldaroth]

Greetings Ye Fellow Cartographers !

Greetings !

First of all, if my english's not clear, please ask me to reformulate...
But let me introduce myself by saying that I really enjoyed seeing all of your community working hard on cartographic maps. This because I do have also a hobby that consists in creating a world from A to Z...
My name is Jim Walker and I live in Switzerland. I'm currently studying Medieval History and Medieval Languages at the University.
As I was saying, I'm working on a great scale project since I am ten or eleven years old. It really started as a serious project only since I've been encouraged by some of my friends around me who try to give me support. And with their help I'm finally able to think that, someday, it'll be finished.
What brought me to your community is the gentle google search engine, as I was desperately looking for some good tutorials concerning realistic mapping.
The project I work on started for RPG needs first (I was GM for D&D but I always felt a bit uncomfortable and frustrated by the Forgotten Realms aesthetic). Then it evolved in a real hobby that wasn't linked anymore with RPG matters (though I'm still playing on the same map).
What I tried to do in my project is creating a consistent world - not just saying "this is it" but attempt to give explanations about why things are the way they are. For this purpose I've drawn a huge map using Illustrator (to have it very precise), set up the astronomical environment (with the help of my former math teacher), created the tectonic, volcanic and geological map. I'm now on the way of establishing the climate map. Meanwhile my coworkers and I have designing mineral materials and we're working now on plants.
After all this part we will pursue with animal design and finally social species with their own culture, religion, language, history, legends, …

I really adore working on this project for it represents at least 8 years of my life. And that's also why I'm still nervous about somebody stealing our job.

I wish I could get some advices or help from some of you to get this project (or at least its mapping part) done properly, as real professional !

Let me now show some pictures thumbs about what I've done.

I'm very glad to enter your Guild and hope it'll be fruitful for both side !

relief..pnggeologic..png

height..pngcampaign..png

planet..png

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[Redrobes]

Welcome - thats a big project you have and its looking very grand.

When you say "to get this project (or at least its mapping part) done properly" what kind of map are you thinking of. Are you needing a more realistic terrain or an atlas style map of your world. Are you mapping it in 2D or3D ?

I would be interested in your process that you have formed to create the climate and the flora / vegetation for your land.

Edit - why is it that when I re-read the posts I always seem to get answers to my own questions. Ok so your after realistic mapping. Personally I would then model the terrain in 3D because the height and contours provide huge detail - rivers, temperature, shadows / slope to the sun, etc.

[Aenigma]

Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me... Welcome aboard ye fellow cartographer!

[Guldaroth]

Glad to be aboard !

@ Redrobes: The problem I have is to realize a realistic heightmap for further 3D mapping. I was first working with Photoshop but I wanted to have the map more precise so I used Illustrator for vector drawing. But now I'm stuck with vectorial contours and when I turn the picture into grayscale heightmap my mountains just look like stairs...

I should have known that I was forgetting something... If someone is interested and if french language is not a problem for you, just ask me and I could grant you access to our Wiki where all the finished work are... (I can also translate some parts if somebody's really interested).

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Redrobes]

Glad to be aboard !

@ Redrobes: The problem I have is to realize a realistic heightmap for further 3D mapping. I was first working with Photoshop but I wanted to have the map more precise so I used Illustrator for vector drawing. But now I'm stuck with vectorial contours and when I turn the picture into grayscale heightmap my mountains just look like stairs...

I should have known that I was forgetting something... If someone is interested and if french language is not a problem for you, just ask me and I could grant you access to our Wiki where all the finished work are... (I can also translate some parts if somebody's really interested).

Ok, a GIS program is ideal but you can get from the stairs effect can be smoothed out if you have enough contours. Since you are in Illustrator then you should be able to export them as SVG or some vector format that you can import into a 3D app like Blender. In there you can set the heights up and get it to create a skin over the contours. Or you can create polygons, extrude them and sequentially slice them up to make the skin yourself.

If you have a lot of contours so that they describe the surface quite accurately then you can fill the gaps in alternate black and white bands then flood fill the bands in ascending shades of grey then blur the image to smooth out the stair effect. You need to use a gaussian blur and ensure that its sufficient to leave no ripples between the stairs.

In any case even if you have a 3D surface with stair steps in it you can put the terrain through some erosion filters to make the effect less noticeable. Like this.

Id be interested to see what you have so far on your wiki - the french will be alright for me (mostly..).

[Guldaroth]

Ok, thank you Redrobes, I will try that again myself with Blender or something. In fact I already tried something like this on Vue6 X-Stream but the problem is that I'm just a real newbie with those programs and 3D vocabulary... I shall give it another try and see what happens!

If you want to access the Wiki, here's the address Encyclopédie Svinlir Gûn and I'll mail you the account infos ! Thanks again for your interest and your help.

PS: This was the best I could do on a part of my map with my few knowledges about 3D mapping (it looked so cheap to me that I prefer not to pursue immediately)
TerresNaines..png

[Redrobes]

Thanks for your invite. I saw the relief map you have. Its not too bad for getting the height into something which you can use as a world map relief to calculate temperature and vegetation.

I made this up quickly by taking the relief map and splitting the image into red green and blue and using the red and blue colours got to a height map where sea level is black and mountains are white and gave it some gaussian blur. I then used some gamma adjustment so that the lowlands were flatter.

From there I would use this as mask or template to determine the temperature offset so that if sea level was 20 Celsius then for each 1000m it drops 6 Celcius so that at 3000m it starts to form snow. In hotter or colder regions this would be more or less but you have the temperature map done.

Once you know the temperature you get good feel for the rainfall and vegetation that would grow there.

Then when you have relief, temperature and vegetation you can combine them all to look at which realistic textures to use to map onto the different areas.

[jwbjerk]

If you want to access the Wiki, here's the address Encyclopédie Svinlir Gûn and I'll mail you the account infos ! Thanks again for your interest and your help.
TerresNaines..png

Google translate seems to do a pretty good job, at least with the only accessible page, the welcome page.
EDIT: unfortunately if you log in Google translate won't work, or it logs you out.