Using satellite images to make a map

[Ghostman]

Greetings, this is my first post here.

Looking at the Blue Marble image of Earth and other satellite images found at NASA Earth Observatory a thought crossed my mind: wouldn't these pictures be useful in constructing a fictional map? So I began experimenting, copying parts of the images to create textures for different types of terrain. It proved quite tricky; a small rectangular area was easy to make into a tiling pattern but the lack of size made it look annoyingly repetititive in a large map. A large sample OTOH was a total pain to get tiling seamlessly. Then I found Redrobes' GenTiled script here, which was a huge boon. So now I have a set of beautifully tiling textures, and present a quick practice map created with them (though not all of them are used in it) in combination with other mapmaking techniques. The mountains didn't turn out as good as I wanted, partly due to poor bump mapping.