Photorealistic maps

[Naima]

Hi , so I was testing and experimenting making a photorealistic map possibly...

My Idea is to proceed as follow but I am really open to any correction , sugestion or totally different workflow ...

Here is what I have in mind and I partially used in the Making of the Nirn map posted in the finished maps forum....



1 Get a map made by heightmap works , might it be out of a tool like worldmachine or a real world map edited in photoshop , doesn't matter now but I get a heightmap .

2 I use that to obtain alpha channel and use it to render down out of a white layer a overlayer mask and also an overlayer luminosity projection to create the bumps.

3 I use a gradient map filled with realistic tone colors from oceahn blue to white top of mountains to blend into the map and colorize it with geographic tones.

4 ....

here comes the part I was thinking most of ...

I wanted a gradientlayer made of textures but I haven't been able to find any tutorial on how to do it , so I procede to create use the mask to make pass throught wanted textures .

5 I prepare different layer large textures, like one for ocean , one for trees, one for ice , one for hills , one for plains , one for mountains , deserts , steppes etc ....

I use then the blending masking to make pass only certain parts of the texture according to the heightmap mask .


6
the issue is I do not know how to relate heightmap whiteness to height level or how to scale it down so to be sure to have a known level for whatershore etc .

7
The other issue is how according to knowing the levels to make a selective mask filtering so that passes for example only values from 140 to 195 rather than getting the whole range from 0 to 255 ...

8 shorelines, I am not sure how to make good realistic shorelines and not srange kind of detached from sea ones .... personally I would like the shores to show the transition from sea to land and so kind of seem visible underwater for a while with degreeing colors ....

9 Rivers, as you see the map has already lot of good possible river flows, is there a way to be able to automate the drawing of a fluvial system taking advantage of those flows?

here is just a small test done with a crap forest texture .... I think already gives a better result than befoure , but still it is not well filtered and issues 6 and 7 show up .

The image shows a distorted alaska .