Silver Dragon
First Post
Hey folks... I've been running my own home-brewed campaign setting for a while now and am just working on a large scale map. I discovered some intersting tools to make some awesome maps. The only problem is they take some know-how, but nothing a few instruction manuals can solve 
If anybody here is familliar with any 3d problems, whether Max, Maya, Bryce, etc... you can use such programs to make very nice maps of your worlds. What you need to do is create/find a greyscale "height map" where high elevation is indicated with light shades and low elevation is indicated with darker shades.
Some of the bets places to get height maps is the USGS sites, though you'll need a special program ("DLG viewer" is recommended). I got a few from the Nasa mars orbiter as well, which worked quite well in my campaign setting.
If you use that height map both as a bump map and as a mask to decide where to place different types of terrain (for instance, desert in low evelations near the equator, etc...) you can make fairly realistic top-down maps. The only thing they'd be missing is dots and text for landmarks/cities.
What I did was take a massive (about 10000 pixels wide) grayscale elevation map of the surface of mars, mixed it with parts of California and Arizona, and then used it with the 3d program. The resulting terrain was really interesting with plenty of little islands and craters. While it's true I didn't put much of my effort into sclupting the map exactly as I wanted (I left that up to Mars), it suited my needs just fine.
Depending on the textures you use, and whether or not you place a bump map on the terrain, you can make the map style any way you want. You can make it look like a satellite image, or make it look like the maps that come with the FRCS. It's really cool, worth checking out if you had time to spare to fiddle with the 3d programs.
I might post an image later.
If anybody here is familliar with any 3d problems, whether Max, Maya, Bryce, etc... you can use such programs to make very nice maps of your worlds. What you need to do is create/find a greyscale "height map" where high elevation is indicated with light shades and low elevation is indicated with darker shades.
Some of the bets places to get height maps is the USGS sites, though you'll need a special program ("DLG viewer" is recommended). I got a few from the Nasa mars orbiter as well, which worked quite well in my campaign setting.
If you use that height map both as a bump map and as a mask to decide where to place different types of terrain (for instance, desert in low evelations near the equator, etc...) you can make fairly realistic top-down maps. The only thing they'd be missing is dots and text for landmarks/cities.
What I did was take a massive (about 10000 pixels wide) grayscale elevation map of the surface of mars, mixed it with parts of California and Arizona, and then used it with the 3d program. The resulting terrain was really interesting with plenty of little islands and craters. While it's true I didn't put much of my effort into sclupting the map exactly as I wanted (I left that up to Mars), it suited my needs just fine.
Depending on the textures you use, and whether or not you place a bump map on the terrain, you can make the map style any way you want. You can make it look like a satellite image, or make it look like the maps that come with the FRCS. It's really cool, worth checking out if you had time to spare to fiddle with the 3d programs.
I might post an image later.
