Real World Mountain elevation data

[Jay-Nicolas]

Hey guys!

Long time lurker... recent poster... Love the site, I've just never been able to get a map going that I really wanted to pursue... There was always something with the way that mountains, and mountain rangers were rendered...

I was so tired of my mountains looking like mounds... Or piles of dirt, when real world mountains have water erosion like this:
http://forum.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=12074&stc=1&d=1238983771


Well... I decided I had to have real world mountains. So I went and found a tutorial ( here (http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=27052) ) that showed me how to export height maps from google earth. (I found the usgs site very unfriendly...)

Once I got some nice dense mountains into photoshop, I spent most of the day creating a tileable (that is: seamless edges) realworld mountain texture.

Then, I defined it as a pattern in photoshop, and painted this pattern on a new layer with a blend mode of screen, overtop of my original export from Fractal Terrains.

My original image with the "mounds" of mountains was this:
http://forum.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=12073&stc=1&d=1238983689

And with about 2 minutes of painting, I was able to turn it into this:
http://forum.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=12075&stc=1&d=1238984254


I was so happy, I decided I'd share it with the class!
So... you can download the full tileable mountain image
RIGHT HERE (http://forum.cartographersguild.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=12076&stc=1&d=1238984416)!
(graciously stored on forum.cartographersguild.com!!)

I hope you all find it useful. Feel free to use it at your leisure. The only thing I ask is that you give credit where credit is due ;)

Thanks!!
-Jay-Nic

[RPMiller]

Welcome to the Guild and don't forget to post to the "Official" Introduction forum. You have some good stuff here and are definitely moving in the right direction.

[Ascension]

I could see this being handy, especially for the pattern mappers. Probably need a few more just for variety's sake but good stuff nonetheless. If you make some hills I'll surely snag those.

[Korash]

All this on a first post, and no rep?!? :shock:

Gonna fix that right now!!

Nicely done.

[Midgardsormr]

It never occurred to me to make a seamless pattern out of a heightmap. Interesting.

You may want to take a look at Wilbur, which is capable of creating those erosion valleys. It's not perfect, and it demands a lot of CPU cycles, but it is definitely a worthwhile program.