Moganites mapping thread

[moganite]

The last shot was wel a bit boring and just to show what had to be done now i have imported into SCTF using 1.0d as 1.2 didnt seem to be able to save for me.

First up just importing and checking for spikes there are a few but it gives a good shot of the SE part of this map which looks like another catchment.



The hills in the  north west are steep possibly too steep.


You might notice that some of the waterways dont look right yet and are too shallow


The delta


The delta at 2 sealevel rises
10 m


70m ( you would need both antartic and greenland icesheets to melt and collapse to do this represents a worst case scenario in terms of global warming) Most of it would be a sea or part of the atlantic ocean.


To deal with the water i can expand the depth range it occupties that will deepen the river to the point it will be alot closer to the right depth but still short.
From there I have 2 options either
Raise the terrain then exand the water then lower the terrain to the propper level. Then smooth\erode the coastlines. Quck and dirty still have to deal with the  narrower rivers being to deep with the amozon being the right depth.

Manually Errode using the erode water tool till the propper depth is reached. very Labour intensive possibly better looking Could take a long time to do properly.

I am leaning to the first option as as its quick it gets a result close to the actual thing and there is a near total lack of reliable data on the riverbed. 60 m should be deep enough for shippingif not its easy to make the channel deeper.

I am inclined to leave the hills as they are as most of the rest of the land is very easy to build on and there should be lots of easily reclaimable land along the flood plain.

[HabLeUrG]

Excellent work in that map 

what about if you make some edit first at photoshop/fireworks to the PNG image, so you could earn time and work in do that... you could also add some deep to the rivers by the edit in photoshop...

that reminds me to make a tutorial about my way in making maps faster... 

[moganite]

Thats a good alternative really good:). I did that with the river and all the little water bodies just that it was set to 2 m below sea level to be consistent with the water data which is very coarse. I could discard most of it  and start back at the land only side

I am developing new ideas all the time and looking at was to make mapping faster an easier with as few trade offs as possible. My first maps took a very long time 40 hrs of work for Reunion island and Newcastle. Inisfail about 10-15 hrs and this one so far without the downloading about 3.

In gimp which is what I use when you select colour it selects all areas of that colour in my case White. I then use a custom brush I made thats 300x300 pixels square and very hard and run it over the entire map. its not perfect but you get the map in with a few spikes that are easily corrected and it was faster than flood filling hundreds of patches manually. One of these days I will find a replace colour with annother one for the whole image.

With the topodata I am worried about loosing the definition of the hills and over flattening the plains

If you have an idea I am willing to try it out just to see what the results are.

[moganite]

Progress report I Have the river at the propper depth and channel and all that remains for the river itself is just smoothing out the banks. That should take 1-2 days once I have the floodplains done and will result in a much more natural look than steps.

The flood plains still need tweaking and will have water tiles that look isolated small ponds mostly will end up being very low land 0.5-1.5 m above sealevel or

[moganite]

Now finally I have more or less completed the region and i have noticed a differnce betwwen SCTF and SC terrain renders specifically the beaches. What shows as beach in SCTF as it is  between 250 and 254 m is solid land in the simcity render and  which appears to designate the range 246 to 250 as beach.

SCTF render


SCrender

MOD EDIT: Cleaned up the link - Fred

[beskhu3epnm]

Your river flow techniques are the best.

Bar none.

[moganite]

This next set of images is in SC and parts of the map that are interesting IMO
I prefer to leave most maps with as light a touch as possible. ie Im lazy.

[Shadow Assassin]

I was wondering: are you able to create a version of that map with more realistic mountains (not so small and jaggy)?

[moganite]

I hope its not to technical

The main problem is the fact that the amazon river is huge and 225 km wide if you include t and doing the same map at the usual simcity scale would of been severly impractical as it would had dimensions of 100 x 100 large tiles. Think about how much hard disk space the existing region takes up and compare it to what it would take up if done 10 gig of hard disk space for 10000 large city tiles. I think th SC4 engin would crash dealing with regions bigger than the biggest known regions and it gets impractical to build on those regions anyways due to load times.

Each large city tile if done at the ususal scale would be equivalent of a region of this size.

I simply found the 1:5 simcity scale too big and it would of broke the 10 MB limit with the largest dimnsions being 48x48 tiles. If you have an area in mind i can blow it up to a lot closer to its Simcity scale depending on its size.

You can scale the mountains vertically down using the compressor tool but the problem I found in doing that is there asre numerous gorges and  cliff that exist would no longer show up. I dont think i could of re scaled the mountains without wrecking the flood plains and making it dead flat. And no region I know of at this scale is dead flat unless you count the abysal plains of this planet. 
There is no way you could verify all ridges and mountains as being the gradient they are as its is mostly rainforest and parts of those mountains probably havent been set foot on for a long time. Even if I could it would take anywhere upto a year to verify all the peaks.

Its a problem that exists whenever we do a map at scales smaller than the usual simcity scale of 16m=1 tile Its a trade off that has to be taken either do one of the three below.
Do the map in the map in simcity scale impratical
Shorten the mountains and flood plain simultaneously can wreck other features  make areas that cant normally be built on be able to be built on.
Leave them as is very difficult to build on  all of a map. This map has about 75-80 estimated percent that shouldnt be too hard to build on and 5 percent I would classify as extremely hard if not impractical. some of the map is possibly unbildable.
Manually smooth the mountains down. Time consuming and reduces the options in terms of interesting city building IMO.

There is a 5th method am am thinking of but its yet to be really tested maybe this map will make a suitable candidate. It wont prevent the pixelation but it might be able to reduce some of the other problems. Have a look at the regional image to get an idea of how much area is easily buildable.

There is no right or wrong awnser in this as it is up to the person making the map what path gets taken. Also it can be changed if someone feels the mountains are too steep in terraformer.

The main aspect of this map i was most worried about was the water side of thing

I hope that awnsers your question.

[Shadow Assassin]

Well, I was just referring to the mountains, not the map as a whole. I'm fine with the floodplains, it's just the mountains that look a bit weird.

[moganite]

 Sorry bout the long post earlier.  Just wanted to explain the logic behind how I made the map. I also wanted to emphasise the point there is no right or wrong way to deal with elevations and scaled horizontally terrain (eg vertically refers to elevation).

They look weird cause the use the raw data for those points and its pixelated for small features less than 500 m across due to the horizontal scaling