like a bad cold

[ldvger]

toja-

Oh my, that is really gorgeous!  Yes, some of the detail was lost, but the major features  are all there: the cliffs and canyons.  Is this new map of yours taking into account the vertical scale of the area or have you already compressed it? 

I'd love to see this new map of yours turned into a region, but it's up to you.  If you do make a region of it, will you be willing to share it with others (like me)?  I'm going to continue working on my own map and see how it turns out, but if I fail miserably, it would be nice to have someone else's work to fall back on.  Which isn't to run down your work in any way or imply that it would be second rate.  I just want to follow my own map through and see how it turns out.

I realized two things this afternoon while tracing 3 more sets of contours.  1.) I am tracing directly over the JPG rather than tracing over a copy of the JPG, so underneath the fills, the original map is still there and I have no way of eliminating it once I have completed my tracing.  I don't know if this will matter later on in steps further down the line or not, but I think I probably should have opened a new file, created a copy of the base JPG I am tracing, then pasted the copy into the new file on it's own layer (not the background layer it's currently on).  This may have been a huge mistake on my part but hey, this is a learning exercise for me and we all make mistakes when learning.  2.) I realized tonite while I was washing dishes that I may have done my math wrong if I want my coast line to follow the -3000 contour line.  The game reads RGB=84 as sea level and I have adjusted all my RGB values so that RGB=84 will occur in the space between the -3000 contour and the -2800 contour.  By the time the map get to that point, the contours are pretty far apart, so I am going to end up with a very shallow beach, I think, that stops at the -2800 contour instead of the -3000 contour the way I wanted it to.  I may create some new contours at 20m intervals when I get to the coastline to fix this problem.  Then again, maybe I'll just run it trhough as is and see how it turns out and if it looks too funky, I'll go back to the greyscale and then create new contours. 

So yeah, toja, go for it!  And be sure to post pics of it here, so we can all oooh and aaaah over it!

Lora/LD

[toja]

Oh my, that is really gorgeous!  Yes, some of the detail was lost, but the major features  are all there: the cliffs and canyons.  Is this new map of yours taking into account the vertical scale of the area or have you already compressed it?

Thank you! And yes, the height data is still present - the image you see is a GeoTiff-DEM with a color-ramp applied to it. I've created it with 3DEM, a small (and free) 3D terrain visualization program.

I'd love to see this new map of yours turned into a region, but it's up to you.  If you do make a region of it, will you be willing to share it with others (like me)?

Nope, I think that would be absolutely impossible ... o.k., let me see... 

[toja]

... I think I've got a little valentine present for you (pick it up here):



... looks pretty cool, eh? 

I've adjusted the sealevel to -3000 meters in RL, everything below sealevel is scaled with a ratio of 1:5.5 and everything above is scaled with a ratio of 1:2. The terrain climbs up slowly until it reaches the continental shelf at about 500 meters above sealevel, while the highest elevation of the map is at 1,473.4 meters above sealevel.

I've only made one mistake: I thought that the ingame-sealevel is at 250 meters but the default height for the sealevel is 261 meters. Anyway, you can easily solve this problem yourself: Open the Terrain Properties Exemplar with the Reader and set the Sealevel-Property to 250.

You will find a config.bmp for 10x14 large city tiles in the .zip-file. There's also an .xml-file with the projection information included, so you will be able to open the file in a GIS-Application like QuantumGIS, a really powerful piece of open source software that allows me to do all this map-magic... 

[ldvger]

toja-

It's beautiful!!!!  I have downloaded the file from your link (thank you so very much!) and can't wait to import it into my game and start rendering the city tiles.  Looks fantastic.

I don't think your sea level error is any big deal, given the tremendous range of elevation in this map.  You're talking 11 m, or about 35 feet, of error in a map with over 3700 meters of vertical change..chump change, to my mind. 

Some ideas and questions.  Now that I see where the coastline sits if placed at the -3000 contour, I am thinking it may want to be placed lower, say at -3400.  This would allow those 2 small canyons and the one large canyon to the left of the main Hudson Canyon to be at least partially above water.  I know this would raise the rest of the landscape up another 400m and that may not be a good thing. 

Are the white areas of the region, along the continental shelf and the plain beyond, snow-covered?  I was hoping to avoid snow completely and use the upper plains as an agricultural area that provided food the the cities of the lower plains. 

Interesting that you were able to compress area of the map at different ratios.  That idea never occurred to me nor did I know it was even possible.  But now it seems obvious, as elevation is mathmatic in origin and of course you could manipulate numbers differently in different areas of the map.  I had realized already that my ocean was going to be fairly shallow once I scaled my map down to game size, but I wasn't overly worried about it, as I figured I'd go back with God mode tools and dradge out a couple of seaports.  Your solution is much more elegant. 

I like, too, how you have been able to capture so much more of the surrounding area than the maps I have will allow me to.  I was going to do a smaller and narrower region that conformed more closely to the detail area of my map...and I may still try that, just to see what it looks like.  I really like the dramatic canyons in this landscape and have wanted to preserve as much of thier grandeur as possible, but the necessity of compressing the heights really diminishes them quite a lot, I'm afraid.  In RL, these canyons exceed those of the Grand Canyon, which is one of the reasons the area has been singled out for such scrituny (including detailed mapping, lucky for us). 

Of my own efforts, this is where I stand with my map as of last night:



Things are going faster now that I'm down off the cliffs and starting into the lower plains.  The contours are simplier and further apart and I can trace most of thier lengths at 100% zoom rather than the 200% zoom I used coming down the faces of the cliffs and canyons.  I found some discontinued and interrupted contours between -2000 and -2400, so I had to fudge a bit there, but I have extensive experience with contour maps, so it wasn't too hard. 

I did, however, start to feel like I was maybe wasting my time and it kinda depressed me.  My greyscale does not fade seamlessly from level to level...there is a sharp line of border between each change of RGB value and I wonder how that is going to translate when I try to make a game map out of it.  I am wondering if my map is going to stair step at elevation changes rather than blend into slopes.  I found a PS tool last night called Gradient, a subset of the Bucket Fill tool, but I have not yet figured out how to use it other than it fills shapes drawn with the shape drawing tools.  I can choose the colors of the gradient and/or peg them to the foreground/background colors, which is useful to learn.  For example, if I am working between the -2400 contour and the -2600 contour, I could set foreground at the RGB value for -2400 and the background for -2600 and theorically the Gradient tool would fill between the two areas from lighter to darker.  However, I don't know if the gradient will adjust itself across a shape that varies in width and shape like the spaces between contours do.  I am also not having a lot of success using either of the toolbar Fill tools, as sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.  I did figure out how to get the Freehand Pen tool to draw lines in the Foreground color, but once a shape is drawn thusly, I can't get the resultant shape to fill, either using the Edit>Fill command of the toolbar fill tools.  I get a little circle with a diagonal line cursor when I hover over the enclosed shape.  I also found the Freehand Pen tool has a Magnetic Pen subset that makes retracing a previously drawn line easier and more accurate, but again I can't seem to fill the resultant shape.

Sean had mentioned using a layer mask was helpful for tracing contours, but that is a PS skill not currently in my set.  If you are still checking this thread, Sean, could you elaborate on how to use masks?  Lines, Shapes, and Fills pointers would also be appreciated  .

toja, if I downloaded the software you provided a link to, is it something a relative dummy like me could use?  If I had a copy of your gradient map, could I manipulate it (would you share and allow me to do that)? 

I think I'm going to take a break from my greyscale map today and render this new region, to see what it looks like.  How exciting!  Thank you toja, for your work and help!

Lora/LD

[mightygoose]

the gradient tool of the bucket fill alternatives is a linear gradient profile. so it will not folow the shape of your contours... to blend use a feathered brush with a value in the middle of the gradient boundaries and trace along the edges of your steppe.

[ldvger]

Goose-

Excellent advice!  Using the Paint Brush tool, I set my brush size to 9 and then under Mode set to Dissolve at a 50% opacity, I went along the hard edge between contours (after first setting the foreground color to halfway between the two colors) and it really softened the edge between the contours.  I went over the same area again at 25%, just a bit further beyond the hard edge, then again at 10% and thought it looked pretty good. 

I didn't find any tool or command that used "feather", so I am guessing this dissolve feature is what you meant?

toja-

I rendered your region this afternoon in game and this is what it looks like:



I like it, but now that I see the above sea level portion rendered at 1:2 compression, it really makes me want to see it at 1:1...or at least steeper than how it is now.  I also think there's too much ocean.  I thought about going back into TF and raising the terrain, but wondered if the difference in compression you described between underwater and above water areas would make a difference.

Most of the beaches are extremely shallow, so much so that there is no wave action at all (and I checked to make sure I had waves turned on), but that is not a bad thing, in fact I kinda like it.  However, a lot of the elevation underwater doesn't show up at all.  I also have to tweak my water mods...my plugins folder is full of San Francisco stuff that doesn't look at all right in this map. 

So, I'm almost ready to chuck the greyscale map I've made so far and start over.  But before I do that, I'm going to save a copy of it and start playing around with it in Mapper and TF and see what I've got so far looks like.  I may have more interesting pics to share this evening.

Lora/LD

[dragonshardz]

Ooh, I like this map. I may end up stealing it XD

[ldvger]

Lets hope 3rd time is a charm.  I've tried twice now to post this and both times inadvertently exited the site before I could finish.   

So well, yeah, I did try to translate my greyscale map into the game last night, but it looked like doo-doo.  Just as I had been afraid of, the terrain stair-stepped between contour lines.  Also the compression was so great that the landscape was very flat, looking for like a terraced rice paddy than The Grand Canyon, so I think I can officially say now that my technique for tracing grey scales was a failure.  I did not go back and "feather" the edges between contour areas as Goose suggested, so that's an experiment for another day.

What I did next was play around with toja's second region and this is what I ended up with:



What I did was back the sea level down 100m and then decrease the height compression to 1:1.5.  The differences are subtle at this photo scale, but show up quite dramatically when viewed in the individual city tiles.  Given that rendering this new map in game crashed my puter to blue screen after the first couple of city tiles (but rebooted and rendered the remainder of the region without problems), I think this is about the max height differential I'm going to achieve.  It's still not optimum, as I would have liked to have more of the upper plateau in the map and less of the lower plateau, but I think I'm going to go with this and start playing it in game.  I may even start a new MD.

If anyone wants a copy of the new map I made, just send me a note or post here, I'll be happy to share. 

Lora/LD

[SeanSC4]

Lora-
Great work on the region so far. It's really coming along nicely. 

Here is how I often use layers for tracing.
1) Duplicate the area to be traced
2) Make the duplicate a higher level layer than the layer I intend to draw in.
3) Set it's fill % to 50 or 75 so that it's visible to a degree (this might not be workable with the light blue contour lines of your image that you're trying to follow).
4) Use this layer as a guide while you draw the contour in the underlying layer.

Mightygoose gave you an excellent tip about the brush. You can also use the Magic Wand tool to select a composite area to use one of the Blur filters on (personally I enjoy the Box Blur). It really comes down to how much handwork you want to do vs how much you want to act upon all at once via a selected area.

[dobdriver]

G'day Lora,

That looks quite good, usgs does have some seafloor dems kicking around it's site but not the easiest place to navigate though.

one suggestion i would recommend though if you are really serious about making some maps is to upgrade your photoshop, version 6 and 7 never had 16bit support. 15bits yes but that is half of the resolution of 16bits or 32000 levels of grey. true 16bit support did not occur until version 8 or cs

cheers
dobdriver