GlennZilla's Own Little World

[ravells]

Superb! Thank you, Glenzilla. I will give this a go when I get home tonight. In terms of colouring the map, I intend to use this tutorial to get hypsometric tinting, so the different altitudes of terrain really stand out.

If you add into the mix RobA's tutorial in the tutorial section on making a heightfield in Gimp , it looks now that by combining these three methods you can pretty much get a world map in which you can determine the rough continent size and shape and location of the mountains AND hyspometrically tint the result as well - which in my book is pretty cool!

Ravs

[GlennZilla]

I did the hypsometric tinting originally and worked out most of my method from there. But I didn't want everything above a certian elevation to look the same.

So I painted the vegetation cover over the top and kept the original black and white height map so that I could select a pixel and state with confidence the elevation of that area.

I guess I just wanted the map to display more like a satellite map with elevation data stored separately.

[ravells]

That makes a lot of sense, but I can only grok these things when I've actually got it open in front of me and can play with the results, which I'll do tonight.

cheers

ravs

[GlennZilla]

For me the elevation isn't as important when describing the area on the map as much as the vegetation and relative roughness of the terrain. So moving the elevation data that I already created in the hightmap is easy to do.

When you tinker with this, remember that you can simply select a single pixel on the upper layers and then hide them to reveal the height map. And then the brightness/grayscale value of the pixel will denote the elevation of that point on the map.

For myself each step in the 256 steps of the grayscale represent's about 50 ft in elevation.

I'll post the PSD file if you want to tinker with it directly.

[pyrandon]

Wow--Glenzilla, this is awesome! Thank you soooooooo much! You did a couple nifty tricks there I don't think I would have figured out on my own! Excellent! Thanks a million!

[ravells]

Hmmm not a great result first time...time to try again!

I love the way you can change the altitude in real time by fiddling with the levels adjustments and watching the snow caps increase and decrease in size.

Ravs

[GlennZilla]

Yeah, it looks like you might want to adjust the levels on the maps. It looks like you are getting some blobs of pure white. That ends up with mountians plateau-ing at the top of your elevation range. There's also a lot of smaller islands.

To fix that you want to make the layer with the rough landmasses a little less white and more black with a curves/levels adjustment. The slightly gray whites will help the highest peaks come out at as peaks and not flat plateaus. The darker greys will make the oceans a bit more "open" and decrease the number of small islands.