Hi all! Another update. A few days ago I considered the idea of adding shaded relief to the areas between the mountains. That sounded like a straightforward plan, so I set to work optimistically. Unfortunately, I met quite a few more bumps in the road than I expected.
First off, I decided that if I want a shaded relief, I'd better do it right from the beginning. It's never bad to do something in high detail, and lower the detail afterwards, right? Why do it, if you can overdo it!
So I started drawing out relief contour lines. Bloody work took me over two days, but what I ended up with was more than I had hoped for:
(don't mind the lack of detail in the upper right corner, that's on purpose. The people living in these lands have no detailed knowledge of the Big Outside, so it's a "hic sunt dracones" sort of thing)
Only after I finished my contour map, it dawned on me that red lines on a white map don't actually have any use when you're trying to make a shaded map. What I needed was a greyscale map, with brightness implying elevation. A DEM (Digital Elevation Model), so to speak. So I started creating that instead, based on the red contour lines, and ended up with this:
Great, right? There was only one problem with this map: the elevation changes are not gradual, but stepped. Creating a shading pattern based on this stepped DEM would result in ugly ring shadows. I'd have to erode the map to the point where the steps would no longer be visible, without erasing important features (such as the gap draining the huge lake/sea in the north). So I vamped up Wilbur, and started playing around with the settings.
Maybe I'm not smart enough, maybe I should've read the documentation better (RTFM, right?), but what is certain is that I failed. Miserably. I either ended up with a map that's only slightly recognisable, or elevation steps that were slightly eroded, but still very much present.
I almost gave up, I can tell you that. For a moment I considered exporting the whole shabang to Sketchup and model the terrain there, but I didn't know of a way to export the terrain again to a greyscale raster file. So I started looking around on the web, and found a payware software package called GeoControl. The package is now adopted by a company called Cloddy, but on the old website I found a free demo version, which I promptly downloaded and started fiddling with.
It was a blast. Much of the work you do by hand in Wilbur (which is exactly what makes Wilbur so versatile) has been automated in GeoControl. I managed to play with the settings enough to get rid of the steps, and exported the resulting DEM to Wilbur for the finishing touches. After a few last tweaks in Photoshop this is the DEM file I managed to create:
Now over to the shading! As a longtime GIMP user who recently switched to Photoshop, I was absolutely certain there should be an easy way to create bump maps using the DEM file as the elevation layer. Well, I failed to find it. So after a few hours of frustration I fired up GIMP and quickly smashed this little beauty into existence:
All I still needed to do was take the light and dark parts, blur them to blobs, and overlay them on my map. And that's what I did. And this, my friends, is the result:
The problem now is: will I really be able to let that bump map sit there, unused save for the blurry shading on my handdrawn map? Or will I cave in and start a complete redo of my map in a more realistic manner? Argh, ambitions! The death of my social life!
What do you think of the added shading, guys? Is it worth the trouble, or does it actually make my map worse than it was before?
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