My First Project in Illustrator

[su_liam]

Okay, so I said I'd try detailing the tropical northwest corner. Still having some issues. It didn't scale up real well to start with. I may have to start the process over again(upscale a little, noise erode, noise; upscale a little more, ad nauseam).

I've been testing a real peachy keen dem tool for one of the local genii who prefers to remain nameless. I've put in maybe three hours on his marvelous program in the four months since he sent it to me. Me mal! Anyway it was working real well for my, thus far unambitious goals. Well, this one seems to have hit just the combi of scale and resolution to be kind of intractable. Basically, I can't seem to find a set of params that don't either leave me with smoothed out inundated mess or a desert.

Enough about me and my tiny brain. This is the northwest corner of Al Burphaban, in the region of Takhta Raja, Desa Hutan and Seberang. The area from 10 deg S to 30 deg S and 80 deg W to 100 deg W was resampled to 2048 square in Wilbur, then I added a bit of noise(my own secret recipe for noise), did a few iterations of basin fill erosion, noise, basin fill, and saved as an hf2. I took the hf2 into the very cool program I referred to earlier and, hey presto. I used the eroded output of the secret program as the dem. For texturing, I used a blend in Wilbur of 3 parts color output from ###, 2 parts altitude texture and 1 part slope texture from Wilbur. Needs work. A lot. But I think it's a good start. The climate still screams anything but tropical forest.

[Redrobes]

That looks pretty good. The sea falls off a bit in the first photo - I know you get these continental shelves so maybe that's realistic I dunno. What do you think the terrain is lacking that would make it into a tropical forest type region. I have no idea because I have seen endless flat terrain with the amazon and also stuff like Angel Falls where theres a mile of vertical cliff. All it seems lacking to me is a load of trees as a tree texture on top.

[su_liam]

Here is a hillshade derived from my more detailed DEM georeferenced onto my continent.

[loogie]

I'm liking it, i've attempted such experiments with different programs as well, but nothing that gets to the detail i'd like... While I LOVE to play around with wilbur, i do not understand enough of it to make any use of it... i've followed the tutorials, but the best thing i can do up is basically just copying the tut using a different image or such... i'd love some erosion tools that are a bit simpler to use... (not saying anything against wilbur but i think its a known fact its quite complex)

My wish is that i could get a DEM to enough detail that I could do all the work for myself (hydrology tools for arcmap can create rivers, as well as use the ... dammit i forget the names (drainage basins? sounds wrong ), DEM can also come up with hillshades, aspects, etc and all that put together can create a respectably realistic way to come up with vegitation regions... tho creating climate, temp, and rainfall rasters would also add to that effect...
something i would really love to do, if i could learn wilbur enough to create something like that, or find a program that would be able to... (if anyone wishes to help.. by all means!)

ArcGIS in my opinion is the best GIS software out there.. of course there are cheaper, and of course there are others that do some of the stuff good, but ArcGIS more... it helps when they have a design and dev team that probably equals the total number of employees in any other GIS company... Their stuff is generally easy to deal with.. and if you REALLY wanted to do some Illustrator GIS mapping i'd suggest looking into the company Avenza, and their Illustrator plugin called MaPublisher... basically GIS capabilities in Illustrator (handles all the projections etc for you, and also imports/exports pretty much any GIS format you can come up with... no wonder its worth almost twice as much as illustrator itself..

They also have a GIS plugin for photoshop, and last i checked (which was years ago) they also had a Flash based web gis product in the works... who knows what they've got now...

[loogie]

Also I'd like to express the value of the hydrology tools in arcmap... (statistical analysis extention i believe?) if you have access to it, you can do things to better the look of your DEM, some proccesses like fill basins (wilbur has a similar function to my knowledge) and mainly, a function called burn rivers or some such... basically if you have a feature class of rivers but you DEM doesn't display them greatly, you can preform this function the "burns" the rivers into your DEM... (it may need to be a TIN, its been so long since i've used it)... think of taking a block of wood and a hot piece of wire in the shape of your river to press against it... it'll burn into the wood, which is essentially what the tool does. There are also sinks and basin tools as well, which i believe can even do rivers for you, but i've never used them...

*sigh* makes me want to bust out arcgis and go to town again

NO I MUST FINISH MY MAP!

[su_liam]

The hydrology tools in ArcGIS are good, although sagagis has some really nice options. I wish I could find another tool as good as ArcGIS for georeferencing. Sadly, my ArcGIS license is going to lapse in june.

I'm trying to work with saga. Making a decent map with saga kinda, bites.

River burning is involved if you don't have a hydrologically proper dem for the stream network in question. I'd like to do a basin-select on a raw dem with wilbur, save that as an image, basin-fill the dem and save the river network for that. Then I go back and reroute the rivers so that they meander across the flat areas without travelling uphill. Finally, I go back and burn my river network into the basin-filled dem.

That should work.

By the way. You really should go to town with ArcGIS. On your map!

EDIT: Here's an image showing how much detail I've added to the northwest region of my map.

[su_liam]

Spent the whole morning trying to re-align a 50 mile stretch of the Air Mengalir River southeast of Desa Hutan and Seberang with the newly detailed channel. It looks really good. It took me three hours. I have about another 15,000 miles of river to go. Back to the drawing board methinks.

[su_liam]

We are now looking to the north towards Takhta Raja from a point above the great Haggisfart Highlands.

This was made with difficulty using the 3d-view option in sagagis. Och Aye!

[Alfar]

Nice! You're a busy fellow

[Ascension]

You just know that all of those gasses have a hard time escaping that valley...pee yew.