The Great Caldera (World of Calidar)

[Thorf]

This is the main regional map for Bruce Heard's new World of Calidar setting. It appeared as a 28" x 22" poster map, as well as a two page spread in the book itself.


The full map at low resolution. The original file is 28" x 22" at 300 DPI, or 8,475 x 6,675.


Detail of the bottom area of the map, showing the Kingdom of Meryath (which is the subject of the other poster map) and the arid Emirates of Narwan.


Detail of the Republic of Osriel. This is the best image I can share at the moment. Osriel will likely be the subject of the next Calidar book, so I will soon be starting on more detailed maps for it.


The map legend.

I have already given an overview of the project in the Meryath hex map thread, as well as a larger scale map of this style in the Royal Domain thread. I won't bore you by repeating that stuff here.

Suffice it to say that this map was a huge undertaking, and pretty much a labour of love for me. It's a very important map for the setting, since it's likely that everything Bruce Heard comes up with for years to come will be based in and around these areas. With that in mind, I developed a height model for the area at very high resolution — 40,000 pixels square — and shrank it down.

I started by creating the height map in Photoshop, as detailed in this blog article. Next, I cut it up into smaller sections, then added a few extra details to each section before eroding it in Wilbur. This process took months —*probably in the region of five or six months —*with a lot of trial and error. It didn't take all that long to hit on a "recipe" to give the results I wanted, but getting each section through the process without errors (such as those caused by the fill basins command creating large flat areas) took some doing. The worst area had to be redone multiple times before I ended up with a satisfactory river system.

Finally, once the height map was complete, I coloured and textured it in Photoshop, combining a number of gradient maps (one for each terrain type) with a forest layer, lighting layers (shaded reliefs generated from the height map in Blender), a parchment layer, and so on.

Last but definitely not least, Bruce provided over 500 text labels to complete the map.

This is my first professional map, and I have researched and learned a great deal in its making — much of it from my fellow cartographers here, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks are very much in order to all of you for the many tutorials and other threads I have pored over during the past year. So, a heart felt thank you!

I still have an awful lot to learn, and even more that I want to do over the next few years. Hopefully I will be lurking around these boards for many more years to come.