Kaladruns mountains, map for PCs

Hi guys,
I'm currently in the process of mapping a portion of mountains to make a map that players will be able to use to draw the tracks they'll follow.
Because of this is supposed to be a "hand drawn map" I didn't want to make something with colour or too technology advanced. I went for the nice old style, but very time consuming though.

At the end, they're will be some texturing to make the feeling of an aged paper.

I was also wondering if any of you would knew a software that could do "relief elevation", something like that:
http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/frwik...46_5)_1882.jpg
I didn't find anything :(

Thanks for any help or advise ;)

I like that. I think I'll try that style in my next map.

Not sure about any programs that can make an elevation map though. i know you can do something like that in photoshop though. Just take a brush and fill in the spot you want at the top of your mountain. Set fill to 0 and give it a stroke. Then make new layers for each height difference, expand the selection, fill, set fill 0%, stroke.

Not sure how familiar you are with photoshop or if you have it. If you want, I could make kind of a mini tutorial for it ^^

Very cool, very time consuming I can tell. Repped for all those hours.

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Originally Posted by raejekii

Not sure about any programs that can make an elevation map though. i know you can do something like that in photoshop though. Just take a brush and fill in the spot you want at the top of your mountain. Set fill to 0 and give it a stroke. Then make new layers for each height difference, expand the selection, fill, set fill 0%, stroke.
Not sure how familiar you are with photoshop or if you have it. If you want, I could make kind of a mini tutorial for it ^^

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I use PS CS2 and try eto stick with it, as it is quite powerful.
I'm sorry but I didn't understand the technique you are proposing. DOing what I've done is actually very time consuming, to say the least. My wrist is killing me but I like the result so far. anything that can save me some time is a blessing so if you're happy with doing a mini tutorial, please feel free ;)

Maybe this will help, I ran a quick experiment, I've been meaning to do something along these lines for quite some time.

I rendered some clouds for variations, then tossed in some black and white with a large fuzzy brush for peaks and valleys.

I ended up duplicating the layer 16 times, and ran an adjustment threshold on each one in increments of 16, then deleted the black on each layer (might be easy to set up an action for that).

I set the fill to 0, put a 1 px red stroke on the layer, then here we go.

The fill to 0 means it should be easy to put gradients underneath to bring out the valleys and such, plus easier to edit to make some more steep valleys etc.

(Done in PS CS3, but there's nothing in here that isn't backwards compatible)

Wow, thanks very much for this Coyotemax, that's great stuff.

So I did the same thing but didn't end up with nice and smooth curves but rather very irregular lines, not really nice.
Did you do something special to make them smooth? Maybe just the way you erased the black. I did Select/Color range/Select black/ then pressed Suppr
Or maybe, you just got that because of some resizing at the end of the process ...

Compare your lines and mine, yours are better! (well, it's not a surprise anyway :D )

Oh no, I completely forgot that step!! I ran a gaussian blur after I did the heightmap (before duplicating the layers), I think around 10 to 20ish, maybe higher.

*blush*

I do kind of like yours though, the jaggedness does work to a certain extent.. though comparing to the original picture, maybe it's better to keep the lines smooth.

I was also messing a bit with the Trace Contours filter, but it doesn't give nice results like this.

In PSP there is a posterize effect and it asks you how many levels. I put in 16 then it clamps to the 16 shades. Then I do a find edges (all) and it gets the contours as greyscale. So then I adjust brightness contrast by +127, +100 and it turns to black and white contours like you have. No need to copy layers etc.

An optional step after the posterize is to run the noise function for median and set it appropriately and it will smooth out the edges.

A lot simpler I think.

BTW: really nice mountains drawing !

Attachment 28010

Well, it's definitely quicker this way. Thanks Redrobes!
I've been using the posterize function with "2 layers value" only, to create random lands but never thought of using it this way.
Thanks for opening my eyes to this simple but efficient technique, I'll use it now!

Another update, the work still goes on.
Since the map has to be B/W (as much as possible) for easy printing purposes, I tried to give it a try with a papyrus style and only use color for the mountainous tracks. I pretty much like the papyrus but not sure about the tracks. There arealso some blank areas that need to be finished but the looking is basically there.
Any ideas to make it better?