This update has been written and rewritten about four times, trying to decide which bits to put in which update. This particular method of mapmaking is as far as i'm aware never been done to the scale at which i have. so while the first of this series of posts gives you a taster, the followers will go into quite some detail. Plus i wanted to sneak another update in before the years end, so here i present to you my third update....

Setting the water

Welcome back, I know a lot of you are probably wondering how I can get on with such a large map. I decided that being that the full map was not a nice rectangle that could be converted easily into a useable region, I would have to play the area as three separate regions in game with the same plugins, and do any mosaic stitching as necessary. Simply because it is my favourite map and it has the most variety the Vagrant Peninsula will be the first of the three maps to get converted.

Now that we have our hand drawn map scanned/photographed nicely into my computer next was to try and translate that into Simcity 4. There is really only one method to convert hand sketches into maps, and it’s essentially tracing. The way I chose to do this is not the simplest. You will need a good photo editing suite such as Photoshop, the mapper, the terraformer, patience and some spare time. Here is a brief rundown of the steps.

You need to know your config.bmp size, you need to multiply these dimensions by 64 then add one to each. This gives you the size of your grayscale canvas. So for me it was:

(40,56)×64+x+y=(2561,3585)

Next I needed to figure out what heights corresponded to which colour grey so I booted up the terraformer, created a gradient from ground level down to the bottom of the sea, and exported it as a grayscale image.

Load this up in Photoshop along with your canvas, which you should fill with 100% black and edit the image type to 16bit grayscale. Paste in your scanned/photographed map as a new layer and resize to exactly fit your canvas to the pixel. Using the lasso tool carefully cut round the majority of your landmass; alternatively use the magic wand tool, dependant on whichever seems to be having the best results. 

Once it is all selected, hide that layer and bucket fill the selection with a grey that you know to be above sea level. Try to use the grey closest to that level to give you more flexibility later. You can flit back and forth between terraformer and photoshop if necessary to get the right heightgray (new word, you all get the meaning right).

Invert the selection and pick a large feathered brush with a lower, darker heightgrey, border your landmass to give some basic shallows. Save this file as your working map, then delete all layers apart from your canvas, save this file as a PNG file, this is your first test region. Boot up the mapper and then create region using this PNG. My result was:

Go back to the working file in Photoshop and select a lighter heightgrey than your land grey, using a large feathered brush gently apply some low hills. Start experimenting after about 120 minutes I had got what was starting to be some semblance of my original map or so I thought.

Next time we will come back to Photoshop where I learnt some hard lessons in how I had bitten off significantly more than I could chew. Although again I haven’t really shown you anything particularly exciting so here is one last shot showing that the terraformer can make beautiful pictures….

Have a happy new year, although shadow assassin & csgdesign are already well into 2010.