WIP - I'll finish it this time, seriously.

[jaspertjie]

I'm always so curious what you people use to make these maps...

[isomage]

I'm always so curious what you people use to make these maps...

I helped TMG out with the mountains, so I can talk a bit about that.

Basically, I wrote a program that reads image data as a height field, samples the pixels at a specified x- and y-frequency to make the vertices of a wireframe mesh, and outputs a 3D projection of the mesh as viewed from a given camera elevation. It can also fake the 3D effect by just perturbing vertices in the y-direction by an amount proportional to the value of the height field -- this way you don't get any vertical squashing of the image, so you can composite it with the original height field to simulate shading.

Attached are an example height field, a fake 3D projection with shading, and a real 3D projection.

For the mountains on TMG's map, he created a height field in the shape of the mountain ranges he wanted, and I did the fake projection and shading (as in Image 2 below), but only drew the horizontal lines.