Mountain Range Maps
Driechel
Traveler
Back to an old favorite of mine, I guess. I'm trying to figure out how to make a good map for a mountain range. Are there any best practices or good examples I should be taking a look at? I'm not looking for this one to be terribly accurate, but a bit of realism would be lovely.
Comments
There are two ways I have used.
Select mountain symbols that come close to what you want.
To show contours. I used different colors for a range of elevations.
There are some posts in these forums that show topographic mapping.
Using other than symbols is going to be tedious.
The first question is: what defines "realism" to you? Do you want something topographically accurate? Do you want something that's immediately recognizable as mountains even to people unfamiliar with maps? How large of an area do you want your map to cover?
Do you have an example map that you like? Starting with a search for something like "stylized map of mountain ranges" in your favorite image search engine is likely to turn up many examples. Moving on to searches by folks famous for their landscape maps like Erwin Raisz, Heinrich Berann, or Eduard Imhof is a good next step.
Take a look at the examples for the Cartographer's Annuals at the ProFantasy site. There are many examples of different mountain styles in the maps there.
While not mountains, here is one of my smaller maps represented with contours of 100 feet versus the actual maps contours of 20 feet. For the players ease, I make each contour interval a different color.
How did you come up with the color range for the mountains? Do you have any examples you could show me?
Also, any tips from folks about how to use the "above" and "below" tools effectively? I'm having a heck of a time trying to get the mountains I place down to not look like crabs climbing randomly atop each other.
On my cell so I tried but couldn't find the particular posts I was looking for.
Basically. Dark green for zero to 1500 feet. Medium green for 1500 to 2500 feet. Light green for 2500 to 3500 feet, etc.
I used a set of bitmap fills instead of colors off the color pallete in the software. But both work.
@Driechel Use "Sort Symbols In Map" from the Symbols menu. Pick the tool, then right click over the map, choose "All", and then press D for do it.
@Driechel
Here are the files I used, the example maps are by someone else.
And here is how I used her bitmap fills.