More Topography

I've continued working on the topographical map over the past few days and, with the help of some comments from fellow cartographers (thanks to AzurePlanet over at the Cartographer's Guild) I've revised the levels of the topography, making the map overall shallower and more realistic.

Inner Sea topography - take 2

I still feel as though there's room for more work - polishing off certain parts of the sections as well as altering the edges to make them more realistic. In general I wasn't to continue making the maps shallower until I only need to add 1 or 2 more level of steepness (level 6 / 7) as I don't want this region to be too high in a global sense. The highest peak in the world is something around 10,000 meters (as a contrast Everest is 8,848 meters), I'd like 10,000 meters to be the 12th height level on the maps.

Speaking about height maps I'm still working on the scale for them but will likely settle on something similar to this (though it's far from final):

12  - 10,000 meters
11  - 8,000 meters
10  - 6,000 meters
9    - 4,000 meters
8    - 3,000 meters
7    - 2,000 meters
6    - 1,500 meters
5    - 1,000 meters
4    - 750 meters
3    - 500 meters
2    - 250 meters
1    - 100 meters


I'm now looking to a final map that's hopefully a stylistic cross between this and this (colour of the former and the clarity of the latter), and though my hopes of finishing the map in December have been thwarted I hope to not take too long on it. though I am keeping in mind that the topography above will be useful for quite a few maps, which will save time there (hopefully!) As I work on the topography I notice that some roads and other routes currently pass through very rough and steep terrain - those will need to be revised.

As I said at the onset - this was a 'proof of concept' map showing me what can and cant be done and I've learnt a lot about the order in which things need to be done, so work on the 2nd map (Pelasgos - half of which is already done thanks to the orientation of the Korachan map) will hopefully be completed a lot quicker. I'm tentatively hoping for at least an average of 1 map per month...

We'll see :)

#topography #elyden #fantasycartography

Korachan Topography

I've been quiet for a while as I work on the Korachan map for the Atlas Elyden. 

I spent some time deciding whether I wanted to keep a Portrait orientation or whether I wanted to switch to a landscape orientation. The reason for this was largely scale - witching to landscape would have given me a bit more legroom in terms of scale (increasing the map size from 100% to 108%), though this would have been at the cost of having to remove Hoamm from the map. Here's the 2 maps next to each other:  

Korachan - Landscape

Korachan - portrait

I settled on the second of the above maps, as a compromise between the two as the portrait orientation was more pleasant given the vertical shape of Korachan - I kept a portrait orientation, though would not include Hoamm as a 'focus' of the page, which gave me a bit more room in the bottom, at the 'cost ' of making the eastern part of the map stick out of the frame (which is a quirky feature I always liked on atlases).

So that's that. The map itself is largely finished, though I may still add a few labels here and there (largely geographical features once the topography is ready - more on that below) and I need to go over the icons again as the resizing left them somewhat blurry. 

Speaking of topography, that's what's been occupying most of my time lately. Of course, since this is me and I have to complicate things, I had to use a top-down approach, rather than bottom-up (start ith the world and work my way down to regions, rather than the other way round) so had to determine things like highest peak and so on before I could start work on the topographies. So far what I have is this: 

The world map will use a maximum of 10 levels of height, each representing 1-mile (the highest peak on Elyden is just under 8 miles (compared with 5.5 miles for Everest, keeping in mind that Elyden is larger, with slightly less gravity and, well, created by gods), though I may change this. So far the map below has 5 layers of elevation, so there's room for 3 more, though I need to revise the topography to make most of the map 'shallower' as it's turning out too high, given the limitation on height I've set myself - Korachan is not meant to be a particularly high region so I don't all available topographical heights, if any of that makes any sense.

I have no idea how accurate or realistic my topographies are (if you spot anything wrong with them please let me know!), though I have to say I'm really enjoying making them. They are a bit time-consuming, especially as I need to try and make the map fit in with features and regions that are already established, though they're very relaxing to make! If anything I need to try and limit the amount of time I spend on them as I could get carried away, though hopefully, more time spent on the map means a better end product.

A note on the colour - these colours are just a temporary feature while I work on the map, and I have a few options in mind - colour gradient, just the topographical lines, or use the topographical lines to help me make a relief map in greyscale. I'd like to try all 3 options and see which fits in the best.

partial topography map - Korachan

EDIT: the entire N-E part of the map is unfinished as yet - just the 'coastal' regions, so far. Also the attached map is larger than the Korachani maps in previous posts as I figured i might as well work on a larger area, in preparation for the next map.

I also settled on a portrait aspect with inset maps on the right, as shown below: