I've no idea if anyone else has already shared a link to this site, but if you are looking for heightmaps to use in Wilbur or FT3 to generate real world relief shade maps this might seem to be a good place.

The only drawback is the Mercator projection, which grossly distorts anything in the extreme north and south.

Hi Everyone :)

This is a WIP thread showing the completion of a map that was started a while back by Jerry Thiel. Jerry has done a vast amount of work for the Community Atlas, but sadly owing to Motor Neurone Disease is no longer able to map. I offered to finish a map of his choice for him, and Jerry sent me the FCW for a map based on the Michigan area south of the Great Lakes where he grew up. I also asked if Jerry wanted this to be a private thing, or if he wished me to do a WIP thread. Jerry chose the WIP thread option, so here we go...

The map (which I have temporarily named "Jerry's Map") is based on the Michigan area around the Great Lakes of North America.

This is what Jerry had to say about the continuation of his map:

"Use any style you want. I was planning on a fantasy world. The big village would have been called "City of the Grand Traverse." The early French explorers called the passage across the large bay from the peninsula tip east, the Grand Traverse, as it shortened their canoe voyage significantly. 

The two villages facing each other on the Upper and Lower Peninsulas I pictured as the capitols of two antagonistic city-states.

The narrow peninsula running north from GT Is called Old Mission Peninsula after a small mission church built to service the local Indian reservation. The northern tip of the on the 45 latitude and there is an Indian legend that warriors would gather there on the summer solstice to shoot at the sun to cause it to turn back to the south so that it couldn't escape to leave the world in eternal darkness."

Jerry - please feel free to comment and guide as we go. It is, after all, your map I'm working on :)

Hi Everyone :)

Ralf is doing a Live Mapping session tomorrow (5 November 2020) on the recently published Spectrum Overland Expansion issue of this year's Cartographer's Annual. If you are able to come along and take part in the Live Mapping session please do. You will be more than welcome to make comments and ask questions.

You can book a reminder by clicking the link above and then using the Set Reminder button.

Thank you - all, again :)

Wyvern - you've had that same experience, eh? It's always a shame, isn't it. The paper is still being tweaked but it is already much as it will end up being. I've tried a new technique this time - tiny wood particles (lines) instead of blobs, like paper used to be before it was made of rags and machine-pulped wood. Thanks for mentioning Spectrum 2 ;)

Jim - That's a really nice city map you did there. I do like the green parchment. I'm going for a similar effect, but instead of having a huge array of many different colours of parchment, I'm doing just the one parchment texture and using a Blend Mode on a single terrain sheet to blend colours with it. The only fills that aren't done that way are the forest and ocean fills. That means I can get away with a comparatively massive seamless paper texture that is 3000 px square, rather than limit the pattern to a more noticeably repeating 1000 px square. I've also used a trick I learned from Simon Rogers last year, and reduced the colours to 64k, so even though it's a png file it's only about a third the size you might imagine.

Thank you, David, Quenten, Dalton, Gary and Joe :)

Interesting reactions from all of you. I have been using several accepted grimdark maps as a muse for inspiration, so I know they are all pretty variable when compared to each other, and that it is more of a story atmosphere than a map thing. So maybe I'm still way off the mark.

I would like to keep those texture colours as they are, though, since they are more grey than coloured already, so lets just see what can be done about the mountains and other symbols yet to be created. A few bright red, green or purple place symbols might just show how grey the rest of the map really is.