Reply With QuoteI'm curious about your symbology; is it something you created yourself, or did you inherit it from somewhere else? It's really great work.
Can you explain a little more about how you did that, or what sources at NOAA you used? I understand the basic image manipulation that must be involved, but finding an appropriate source and matching it with your topography... i don't know where to start...Originally Posted by a2area
I had planned to paint in my elevation by hand, but i'm realizing such a process won't give me the results i want, and will take a very long time.
I'm curious about your symbology; is it something you created yourself, or did you inherit it from somewhere else? It's really great work.
Well, I would never venture to do it that way again.. but i was learning! NOAA has downloadable "DEMS" they call them with topographical data of the planet. They come out as greyscale heightmaps which can be used in photoshop as texture maps or lighted to look 3 dimensional. I matched those up with the satellite images i used and i had the original photoshop document with all the satellite images and masking i made for the satellite map.. without which it wouldn't have been very possible... Still, tons of scaling, rotating, flipping, stretching and skewing!! Finally, I adjusted their grey tones so they would match up fairly well and then lit the image in photoshop.
Actually, Fractal Terrains has a pretty nice "incise flow" feature built into it now so it helps A LOT to get a more realistic feel to your landscapes. That is the route i would go at this stage.. followed by a run through Wilbur, but it was definitely an experiment in patience (0:
I have started (on the side) a tutorial for this site which will walk through fractal terrains incise flows on a landscape and then take it through wilbur with some erosion "step-formulas" i made up on a few different scales that produce some nice results. They key is applying different incises to different elevations and some overall, also to use precipitation erosion minimally above sea level and mostly to lower elevations below about 2000 meters... you can be pretty aggressive with precipitation erosion under the sea though to get some small drainage crevices which look nice. I still haven't tackled the ocean trench issue but it's on my agenda.
When you say symbology, do you mean the political map symbols.. like the city symbols etc., or the heraldry? If you mean the heraldry I put most of it together myself by gather various elements from coat of arms .svg files i find mostly on wikimedia commons. The only one I "stole", not really because it is public domain.. is the angel and griffin which were the COA of Austria-Hungarian Empire. Otherwise you can say I made the rest. The crowns i found on some free vector site and then heavily edited them. I built the Torentine Imperial Crown from scratch in illustrator but it is heavily influenced by the Crown of Hungary.. or crown of St. Stephen I believe. I rely heavily on shapes, silhouettes, dingbats, free fonts etc. and clippings that i take from the internet for use as building blocks for whatever i'm trying to make. There are also flags for some of these places.
Here is a blow-up of the symbols... as well as some symbols for another nation.. which i have made some maps for and are posted on this site also.
I actually was kind of curious about both. Thanks for explaining the heraldry!
Thanks, i guess that's what i'll have to do, since all the relavant programs seem to be Windows only. Still it's good to know that this method can work-- and work really well.
umm...wow...simply...wow
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
excellent work!
I found it very inspiring (the style of your political maps recalls that of the National Geographic maps); I recently posted a very modest map experiment using the annual political add-on of CC3 on this forum
Love the political so much!
Your political map is splendid, very classic styling, I love it!
I saw that you said you were copy-pasting and morphing from NOAA maps, so I ran over to their site to check them out. I can see why you like them, but I have to wonder; why don't you do the same thing with the US Topo maps? They gave the same information, only more detailed and if you download the PDFs, you can remove their most of their markings with the Layers tool. What I love about is simply that the USA is large enough to have samples of just about any kind of terrain I might need. The only complaint is that the river names are inclusive in the hydro layers, which requires some extra work on my part.
https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic...opo%20Download
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