There may be some technical disparities but I don't know what they are...someone here surely would know. I guess bump-maps could be applied to anything like walls or car hoods or snack boxes to give the surface some texture while DEMs are earth specific. I'm guessing there. They're the same thing really in application for what we do with maps.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Then it probably doesn't matter.Originally Posted by Ascension
I got to thinking about brushes made from DEMs (or elevation bump maps)... after some experimentation, it seems pretty promising. I doubt they can produce perfect results, but it should look a lot more authentic than round, fuzzy brushes.
It is indeed time-consuming, but actually i'm pretty happy with the copy/paste elevation method. It has a way of including interesting details that i hadn't intended, which makes it more fun, and increases the authenticity of the final product. Of course i still have my larger, more complicated continents remaining. The true test is to see how much of my enthusiasm remains for this method at the end.
I've more or less completed two of my smaller continents. I don't think it will be nearly as easy as i feared to spot the terrestrial origin of the pieces i "borrow". IIRC i used 4 pieces of Earth (plus one for the island on the right)-- anybody care to guess which ones?
Radial gradients are a great tool to pitch the elevation of an area in the direction you want.
P.S. Interesting thing i've observed. Lots of imaginary maps have continents with mountains roughly in the middle, but earth doesn't seem to work that way. Almost all the main watersheds are jammed up against one side of a continent, usually with a smaller watershed opposite.
As though moving plates accumulate long piles of stuff on the side that's undergoing collision vs. the simple fractal models that use a function that's the same in all directions, which means that the high spots will be in the middle. It's a good observation that many people never make.
Nice work on the altitudes, btw.
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