Thinking Big about Guild maps

[Redrobes]

These are easily fixed.... New page of 'D' with horz wrap and with / without polar stuff.

I am quite happy to go with an FT terrain if it can produce a really nice height map with above and below sea level stuff at 16bit. I don't know the app very well but I am sure it can do it.

[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.

[RobA]

Ah well, to each their own. RedRobes Images to me do not look like a world to me. I look to see how the east/west come together and don't see it. Because of he square shape I can see the North & south really pinching, and the east west really stretching to form a globe.

I think the real difference here is a random generation based on a spherical vs a rectangular mapping.

The FT maps are actually generated on the surface of a sphere and then converted into a rectangle, using a simple latitude->x and longitude->y mapping (which is why they are twice as wide as tall....). This has the side effect of making things from the polar region look smeared out horizontally (in much the same way that in many map projections Greenland looks as large as South America!).

Redrobe's maps, especially the later ones, are "seamless" are more akin to a toroidal mapping, where the tops wraps around to the bottom and the sides wrap around to each other. This rendering does not take into account a final spherical shape. This is, I believe Neon's point.

So Redrobes posted maps (the non seamless ones) are great for reflecting square areas of land, but do no apply well to the total surface of a sphere.

-Rob A>

[ravells]

I think that's what I find I don't really like about FT generated maps, the continents seem to be long and thin - but as you say that might just be the projection. One odd thing I found with FT is that a mercator projection is returned as a square and not a rectangle - not sure why that is. I might have another play with FT to see if it can get rid of the 'long thin' look by playing with projections and parameters.

[NeonKnight]

Here are some more 'projections' to eliminate the 'stretched out' landmass.

First is a Northern Projection (looking from the North Pole), second is a South Pole Look, and finally the world as if it was a 20 sided Die (nice as the 20 sided die is close to a sphere).

[su_liam]

The Mercator projection is actually infinitely long in the NS-direction. You can't actually show the north or south poles in a conventionally-oriented Mercator map. The usual equirectangular projection is 2:1, as RobA says, because x and y map directly to longitude and latitude which range from 180W to 180E and 90N to 90S.

I'm kind of wishing we had waited a little longer before putting up the poll. I'm pretty sure both NK and RR had knocked off some quickie maps as a way to get the ball rolling. Also, I was hoping to put my own hat in the ring<waah>.

Oh well. It's still difficult to make high res zoom maps with pG. I see HandsomeRob generating 4880x4880 rasters from a small part of a larger world map. Until pG gets zoom capability that's problematic. My 8192x4096 renders take forever as it is, I don't want to have to create a 31 megapixel world just to cut ou a 4880 pixel square. Working on it...

[ravells]

That's much better. Anyway...all of this is a sideshow - let's get on with the real mapping!