Thinking Big about Guild maps

[NeonKnight]

Well I'll be the first to say, OK, I don;t really know what you are talking about with HEIGHT MAP

Here is yet still another version of World 4 to show of the continental shelves and stuff I had hidden because of the light angle I had hitting the map.

[Redrobes]

A height map is a greyscale image which for these world maps should be mid grey at sea level, white at the highest mountain and black at the deepest sea bed - or scaled within those extremes for whoever is the greater.

Ideally you need a 16bit heightmap because an 8bit greyscale image having pixel values from 0 to 255 is not enough height res to work with. For example, if a mountain was 25600 ft above sea level then each grey increment is then 25600 / 128 = 200ft which is horribly coarse. In 16bit that would have been less than a foot which is acceptable.

If you have a height map then you can do some excellent things. Firstly you can algorithmically generate a basic texture for it. Secondly you can start to calculate where the rivers will be. You can also calculate the approximate temperature based on height and determine where snow will be. Then theres erosion and start to have nice looking mountains, glaciers, vegetation etc.

Its not the be all and end all but it can cut the work of mapping a large area into a small manual and large compute process which suites me as I can do something fun like browse these posts while I calculate more terrain.

Look - why not have a play with this app and see what you think of it. Just press next to go to the next world and keep going noting down the number of any nice ones you see. If you press save then it will save the color and two types of height map in the same directory. One is HF2 which is 16bit and the other is just another BMP type image. This one puts the sea at black and mountains at white. The HF2 one contains the sub sea bathymetry also but the BMP is just the above ground height. We need the sub sea too tho to work on a map and at 16bit. Its a hacky bit of programming but thats why its free.

Actually I am pretty sure that you can import a height map into FT too. Try that out if your able.

The apps are linked here

[Airith]

Well I'll be the first to say, OK, I don;t really know what you are talking about with HEIGHT MAP

Here is yet still another version of World 4 to show of the continental shelves and stuff I had hidden because of the light angle I had hitting the map.

That looks great neon, definitely a world to build from. It seems to have everything, giant lakes in some parts, giant mountain ranges in others, and enough sea for anything. Although there seems to be a mountain shortage or something, but that's just my thinking. It's probably more realistic then what I think though

The top right section of land looks a little... Squarish?

I can see so many spots I'd want to 'claim' though

[ravells]

FT does produce Heightmaps (although i do not believe that these are 16 bit). As I said earlier you can generate a heightmap by going to: Tools/Show Other Shader/Bump Map.

FT can also produce normal maps (which is very cool) by using: Tools/Show Other Shader/normal map.

FT can also export as a CC drawing which in turn can be saved as a DXF or DWG file which is useful for people using vector graphics programmes.

From that point of view FT/CC is brilliant.