WIP - Map of Toril

[ravells]

Now that's what I'd call a labour of love.

[Ascension]

Totally. And I thought I was a micro-manager of detail, hah, this blows me away. Kudos to you for the time and effort as well as producing a map to make me envious.

[Patrakis]

Hello all,

I've pretty much finished the contour lines of the main continent. Here are the results: http://patoumonde.com/maps/Toril_progress_6.pdf

I'm far from done but it gives an idea of the final result i'm hoping to get. The relief effect will enhance it immensely i hope. I'm still analyzing some of the contour lines. Somehow, something is not right and i can't put my finger on the problem just yet. I've tried to make a TIN file in Arc GIS with those contour lines but it made me realise that TIN files, to be effective, need A LOT of contour lines and i have few for a world map. I don't think TIN files were made for world maps. I will have to find another way to achieve the effect i want. Sketchup has the Sandbox extensions and i'm thinking VUE 6 maybe. I think i'm in a slump after making so many contour lines hehe.

Any suggestions you guyz might think of would be greatly appreciated.

I'll keep in touch anyway, for those that follow the adventure

Pat

[Redrobes]

The chap who I believe knows more about this than anyone is 'monks' who is a member on this site. I don't know exactly what process he uses but I know its on Global Mapper. Maybe SeerBlue might be able to add a little on that too. You could PM both of them and see what they think.

[Sigurd]

"One Wilbur for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.

One wavelet-based terrain stitcher to find them
And in the Wilbur Bind them......"


Please, more love for Wilbur, Please!

[Patrakis]

Well, there's been great development on my part. I finally found a way to incorporate my map in FTPRO and i'm begining the learn this software.

I thought to share these new images of my latest work.

I played with the spin tools of FT and made the first spin planet of Toril since FR Atlas I think.

So here it is.

Till later.

Pat

[Steel General]

Cool, I always liked those spinning globe images of peoples created world's.

[landorl]

That looks great. The spinning globe also appears to let you see what the elevations look like. That is a great bonus!

[SeerBlue]

Looks real nice, I don't know much about Toril, or anything really, but I do have a little knowledge concerning makeing a heightfield from contours.
A quick look at your map shows 8 different elevation ranges, but my eyes aren't so good so I could be wrong. And I see you did it in Illustrator from your post, so if you wanted a quick and dirty way to generate more countours I would suggest going greyscale.
What I mean is, and I am not good at explaining, take your map as it is now, convert each color to a greyscale range, ie lowest is black highest is lighter,.
The fun part is figuring out the elevation average for each of those colors so you can decide how many "contours" you want when done.
So, for example, if your not doing the seafloor set your water as 0,0,0 and fill a layer matching your ocean water coverage.
Now is where you need to know the elevation of the next contours, and how many you want, as each successive layer has to be set a a color that kind of closely matches the ratio between each contour.....
I said I was not good at explaining did I not.... say you want 16 contours on your map, so divide 255 by 16 and you get about 15....so if sea level was set at 0,0,0 the next contour would be 15,15,15, select and fill,,,,and so on. You don't have to use 0,0,0 to 255,255,255, as long as the ratio between colors matches the ratio between contours,,,,and I usually set each contour as its min height, so I can add deail with a brush using a shade that is less than the min height of the next contour up in elevation, if that makes sense

The reason for going in greyscale is once all the layers are filled you can do some blurring to average it out, dodge and burn for detail adding, use different brushes to add noise/clouds/plasma suitable for the local, and so on and then once you are happy with your black to lighter image you can import it into Wilbur and set the elevation span and extents if you want to make a terrain for export.
If you look at a dem file you will see it only uses a limited range of greyscale, not black to white, so the transitions are smoother, no stepping.. the important thing is to know your min height, your max height, and then set a specific increment to follow when filling your layers.

SeerBlue

[Patrakis]

Seer blue,

That is exactly what i done...using Grayscale i mean. But don't know illustrator or photoshop enough to do what you tried to explain. That being said, it was my next step. Figuring out a way to smooth things out so i get nice transition between shades of gray. As of now, i traced by hand 9 coutour lines in Illustrator. In painstaking high detail. I'm dreaming of a way to accelerate the process.

As always, i'll keep you all posted here on my progress.

Thanks

PAt

What you explain will greatly help that process.