Fictional Landscape, Part 2

By Jeffrey

I’ve been meaning to post this second part of the fictional landscape for a while. I did this nearly a year ago, so I think it’s finally time that I got to a write-up.

In the previous fictional map post, I showed how I take digital elevation data from and existing location, then morph it into something new…creating a fictional landscape, with a history. I left off at the bare earth form–no water, no ecology. In this post, I’ll go over how I created the water, vegetation, and a general ecology.

I wanted to have an accurate form for the river, so I went looking for some interesting braided river channels. I found this Alaskan river on opentopography.com, which had high-resolution elevation data I could work with. I used it to model the braided stream.

This river worked well because it had been mapped with lidar, and the data was publicly available. With one meter resolution, it could be easily incorporated into the model I had already created from the Meteor Crater data and World Builder.

I took cues from aerial photos to color forests and desert/steppe areas. Both of these aerials are from east of the Sierra Nevada, near Mammoth Lakes.

To create a 3d texture for the forests, I found a forested area of lidar data from opentopo.com, then rendered the treetops in Blender. The rendered layer was then copied into the map with the Photoshop clone tool. Faded masks and a drop shadow were added to enhance the depth.

Underneath it all I added a set of subtle hypsometric tints to give an arid or humid suggestion to the ecology (thanks Tom Patterson!). In Photoshop, I created masks to have them more pronounced in different areas. It isn’t obvious in the final map, but it does help to create an overall effect.

It is all assembled in Photoshop. The final map contains about 20 layers, as well as a variety of masks, filters, and transparencies.

Fictional Landscape, Part 2

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