3D mapping

[lmbarns]

Imbarns,
I checked out your youtube but could not make out which app you where using during the demonstration. I hope you can shed some light on this for me as I am just now learning the what fors of 3d modelling etc.
Thanks,
Bill

Sorry, I haven't been back to this site in a year or more. For that map I drew the grayscale image in Photoshop, but you could use gimp or anything, I like to use google maps then select broad regions and fill them with colors to recreate the terrain in a 3d editor.

So that particular map was done in a game engine called Unity 3d. It has a whole set of brushes/etc so you can deform terrain and texture it by just drawing with the brush. You simply import a heightmap for the base terrain with a couple clicks, then smooth it out with one of the brushes and you can draw trees/plants/textures with the brush. Extremely intuitive. Then you can throw buildings out and move/rotate them with the mouse.

But now I've switched to doing heightmaps in Blender because I need low poly terrains to run on mobiles and Unity's terrain gives you less control over polygon count.

In Blender I take a heightmap from photoshop and displace a plane to recreate the hills/valleys/etc. Then in Photoshop I select different shaded areas of gray and replace with my textures, then apply it to the mesh in blender, then import it into Unity to use in games.

I'll try to make a tutorial today if I have time, I just bit the bullet and learned the "blender" way yesterday and once I figured out how to do it, it's awesome.