I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 to create the images along with a program called "earth sculptor" essentially switching between programs when its limitation was met and the other program did something the other couldn't.
This version has a custom altitude swatch which was helped with by people in the servuo discord a few years back. Feel free to shout yourself out if you remember helping me with it. The swatch is 100% tied into the Altitude settings. You must learn to create crisp heightmaps in order for it to work.
Just turn off all anti aliasing and make sure to use the pencil tool with a solid brush no faded edges. Because you might need to swap to rgb mode rather than indexed mode you will want to make sure to keep your edits solid and crisp without gradients (because the gradient includes colors from outside of our swatch). This is the best advice I can give you.
Feel free to swap to earth sculptor if you can get your hands on it. It's great for building mountains and paths but not good for creating perfectly flat ground (one solid color). So when perfectly flat is absolutely needed (water tiles are the only example) you should work in PhotoShop at that point. It's also very possible to create high end ramps and paths in photo shop.
You should start with altitude first as it will be most detailed like this...
To inspect such a rock map use the command "[m tele"
Also forgot to say don't use the blue color in the altitude swatch it has basically not worked after 100 attempts. Just use the greens only in the altitude map and then in the terrain map use all rock except for shallow water where you want the water. Don't forget to only put water on level ground with at least 3 tiles of additional spacing on the side to all for sweet transitions.
I found out that you can get clean transitions now this way. Check out the examples to help you get it right.
The terrain map in the above images is not finished there are lots of errors but it compiles. It's not finished but it compiles make sense? It still needs a lot of work to get it good. As it is its too smooth for my tastes so I plan to make it a bit rougher in the altitude map. I used too much blur to get the edges smooth. In game it looks almost flat.
Any update or edit from now on I will post as a comment.
This version has a custom altitude swatch which was helped with by people in the servuo discord a few years back. Feel free to shout yourself out if you remember helping me with it. The swatch is 100% tied into the Altitude settings. You must learn to create crisp heightmaps in order for it to work.
Just turn off all anti aliasing and make sure to use the pencil tool with a solid brush no faded edges. Because you might need to swap to rgb mode rather than indexed mode you will want to make sure to keep your edits solid and crisp without gradients (because the gradient includes colors from outside of our swatch). This is the best advice I can give you.
Feel free to swap to earth sculptor if you can get your hands on it. It's great for building mountains and paths but not good for creating perfectly flat ground (one solid color). So when perfectly flat is absolutely needed (water tiles are the only example) you should work in PhotoShop at that point. It's also very possible to create high end ramps and paths in photo shop.
You should start with altitude first as it will be most detailed like this...
To inspect such a rock map use the command "[m tele"
Also forgot to say don't use the blue color in the altitude swatch it has basically not worked after 100 attempts. Just use the greens only in the altitude map and then in the terrain map use all rock except for shallow water where you want the water. Don't forget to only put water on level ground with at least 3 tiles of additional spacing on the side to all for sweet transitions.
I found out that you can get clean transitions now this way. Check out the examples to help you get it right.
The terrain map in the above images is not finished there are lots of errors but it compiles. It's not finished but it compiles make sense? It still needs a lot of work to get it good. As it is its too smooth for my tastes so I plan to make it a bit rougher in the altitude map. I used too much blur to get the edges smooth. In game it looks almost flat.
Any update or edit from now on I will post as a comment.
