Good 3D mapping software?

[caters]

I am wondering if there is any good 3D mapping software. The reason I am asking is because I have tried paint shop pro for my regional maps and I did it like this:

Layer 1: Outline and fill basic land
Layer 2: Outline and fill river, streams, and lakes

This second water layer is where I had my problems(Specifically, even without gaps, the blue would fill the whole page).

The Black Sword River(Main river near civilization) is what is called a braided river. It starts off as a river from way up north by a different name and then once it gets to the crater lake it becomes the Black Sword River. This crater lake used to be a huge mountain but an asteroid knocked off most of the mountain and left a crater that fills up with water and then dries up and then months later it fills up again. Then several branches come off of it but the river itself continues to get bigger until it reaches the Tehachipi Mountains. Once it reaches that mountain range it separates into several streams and 1 main stream and then those streams merge back into the Black Sword River. The river itself starts off to the west but then it really changes to southeast and when it gets to Region 1, it is off to the east of the civilization. 1 branch of this river comes off about halfway through its region 1 trajectory and becomes Big Walnut Lake. There is 1 big isolated lake that is in no way connected to the Black Sword River or Big Walnut Lake or any other body of water. Most likely it was connected before but over hundreds or thousands of years deposition became higher than water flow until it was completely isolated.

So anyway, is there any good 3D mapping software where I can have these layers and not have to worry about 1 layer filling the whole page?

[waldronate]

I don't think that you need a 3D tool. It sounds like you are using some sort of floodfill (or magic wand) tool to do the fill. If so, it sounds like you might have the wrong layer picked as the boundary for the fill or have gaps in the edges that let the fill leak out.

A common technique is to prevent this in paint tools is to draw the water with a solid brush on a transparent layer and then do the edges from that. This is trivial in Photoshop because it has a stroke layer effect that will automatically place a stroke along the edges of non-transparent areas on a layer. I do not know if other packages like the GIMP or Paint Shop Pro have a corresponding feature. If not, selecting the transparent areas, expanding the selection by a pixel or so to cover the edges of the areas, and then converting the selection to a border and filling that with your stroke color might work well enough.

Doing this in vector-based tools (Inkscape, Campaign Cartographer, Fractal Mapper) makes this sort of problem a non-issue because they typically have separate fill and outline attributes and they also maintain the logical integrity of the river (it's never just a bunch of pixels). It can be a little harder to knock holes in entities in vector programs than in paint, but it's usually not too bad and it's not something that you need to do much with even a little planning.

[caters]

So your saying I don't need to do 3D mapping to solve this problem? That is nice but what about when I combine all these regional maps into a world map(which I will do eventually)? I might want a 3D mapping tool for that.

[Azélor]

what do you mean by 3d mapping?

you want to do something like this ? http://www.outerra.com/

[waldronate]

If I understood your original problem report, I think it is just a matter of changing how you use your tools a little. The statement "Specifically, even without gaps, the blue would fill the whole page" was suggesting an unconstrained floodfill. I apologize if I misread your original request.

If you want to do something like https://cartographersguild.com/showt...t=33087&page=2 or https://cartographersguild.com/album.php?albumid=4578 or https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=29412 or https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=18120 then you can just run a basic paint program and paint black and white things and let Wilbur generate 3Dish things for you. If you wanted to keep basic 2D painting with layers to create individual maps and then assemble them onto a globe surface using any number of GIS tools like QGIS that can help you. A more primitive tool like Fractal Terrains from ProFantasy can also do this sort of things, but it takes a bit of fiddling about to get good results.

[waldronate]

As a mildly off-topic point of amusement, I have lived most of my life within sight of the Tehachapi mountains (likely no relation).

[Redrobes]

what do you mean by 3d mapping?

you want to do something like this ? http://www.outerra.com/

Outerra is really amazing but unless something major has happened whilst I have been distracted, it has limited scope for changing the world unless your chummy with Cameni. You can edit in some tracks and add buildings and other 3D objects but the world is mainly Earth or Middle Earth.

[johnvanvliet]

Layer 1: Outline and fill basic land
Layer 2: Outline and fill river, streams, and lakes

this sounds like you are drawing cartoons

a black outline and a color gradient fill

normally you would use transparent layers and draw the rivers on that and overlay

as above please define what YOU think "3d" software is

i use Blender for things like
https://goo.gl/photos/i9GyaJoZp2HDrsyw7
or this Dwarf Planet "2015_RR245" ( a real KBO with a 700 year orbit, artistic texture )