How do I do realistic mountains top-down?

[SteffenBrand]

Hey guys!

Ive been wondering how I can get realistic top-down mountains done in Photoshop - since I can't (and don't want to) use Wilbur due to the lack of flexibility and the fact that I use a Mac - I've been testing around with some techniques.

Different colored layers of bevel/emboss kind of looks unnatural, like this (even thou this was very quick, it will not go in the same direction):



It's kind of embarrassing to me to even ask this, since I have the feeling I normally could figure something like this out by myself, but I'm missing diversity. Sure, drawing everything be hand, every hue, every crack, etc. would work, but on a map with the size I have this really isn't a viable option. I was going for something like this:



Well, I hope you can help me. Didn't find any tutorial or tips really working towards something like this.
I'd be thankful for any advice... it's proven harder than I imagined.


Cheers,
Steffen

[Chick]

I can think of two ideas quickly. One is the Atlas style tutorial which does give reasonably decent mountains. The other is to use shaded relief mountains and merge your colors into them.

[SteffenBrand]

Well, shaded relief mountains look way more like this. Actually I didn't found a tutorial or something similar with this before. :/

[Chick]

Here are a couple of shaded relief map sources:

http://www.reliefshading.com/
http://www.shadedreliefarchive.com/
http://www.loc.gov/item/2012586886/

[SteffenBrand]

Thanks, one of them I hadn't known before =)
Just tested around, I could make something like this in under 2 minutes. I'll test it and let you all know if it works. Tried some martian otherworldly theme here, just for fun.

[johnvanvliet]

on your mac
can you install the GCC compiller and build source code

there are a few things you could build from source ,apple is a BSD variant after all .