Relief shadows on Illustrator

[Midgardsormr]

Yeah, Illustrator isn't really the tool to use for shaded relief, although it's outstanding for many other cartography needs. Your existing contours are fairly low-resolution (not very many steps), but you still might be able to use it to generate shaded relief in Photoshop or the Gimp. You'll need to find a way to reliably interpolate between the different elevations in order to get a smooth greyscale gradient. Ideally, you'll want the very highest point to be white and the very lowest to be black. Then use that image to generate the lighting information. In Photoshop, that would be done by copying the greyscale data to an alpha channel and running the lighting effects filter on whatever image you want the relief to be applied to. I recommend a layer filled with 50% grey, so the result can be placed over anything and set to overlay—that will apply the relief in a non-destructive manner to anything you like.

You might also look into Wilbur, which can potentially add a lot of erosion detail to your heightmap, and I think it will also output shaded relief, although I don't think it will do much for creating your initial elevation map.

The Gimp might be the way to go to get your gradient, as it has a very nice tool that can create a gradient from the edge of a selection to its center, something that Photoshop can't do, as far as I know. Illustrator might be able to do it using a gradient mesh, but I'm not sure how that works, and it's far more complicated than the simple Gimply approach.

[Nathan]

Thanks for your answers, i'll give it a try even though i'm not very used to map making in photoshop