Relief Maps Revisited

I recently was able to switch to GPU rendering (for simpler scenes, my card does not have a ton of VRAM), and took the opportunity to try a suggestion by @HYLK in rendering a relief map with a paper-style texture. This one is more of a velour style paper, which I thought went really well with the colors I also tried. I also added a bit more detail in using a combination of qgis and World Machine, as the original heightmap file from the game was only 3072². It was an arduous process of setting up a thing where I could extract the contours of the heightmap to put it into a semi-vector format, then scaling and rasterizing to get a higher resolution heightmap without any visible artifacts. Then off to World Machine to sharpen up some of the details. I played with adding some erosion into the mix for some extra detail, but even very minimal erosion changed the landscape too much for my tastes. In any case, I really liked the output, much more than the original marble version, so I figured I’d upload here!

Breath of the Wild Relief Map

I also tried adding the labels and colors in Photoshop after the fact, and found that it helped the texture line up with the displaced geometry a bit better (and separated the text from the underlying terrain, which made it easier to read in most cases).

I would love to, in the future, try this with other game maps (though finding actual heightmap data from existing games is not easy, so I’d have to get much better at recreating than I am currently), so let me know if you have any favorite maps you’d like to see in this style!

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@blattacker Looks awesome! You can try some terrains from witcher 3, CDPR has been pretty good so far providing official tools for modding their games. Here’s one source for Witcher 3 terrain maps:

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