Realistic Fantasy Maps – An Overview
Before diving into the details, I want to give a high level overview of the process. This helps to understand why we do each step.
Step 1: Plan your project
Before embarking on your map-making journey, you have a few things to consider:
- What style of map do you want? Maximal realism, or a more exaggerated Video-game style?
- What scale will your map be? World/Continent/Country/Region?
- If you want a realistic style, then your map scale cannot go too far beyond Gaea’s maximum scale of 2,400km x 2,400km
- If you are looking to replicate an existing map, how much freedom are you willing to give Gaea to place features like rivers, or change coastlines? (I beg you now, do not try to replicate existing rivers unless it is 100% needed. Even then, think whether it makes sense to show rivers at the scale you are using, it is likely better for you to not show them at all)
- Do you just want a great looking new map for minimal effort? The “Realistic” image below was generated using the procedural workflow in this video! Head there now instead!
Step 2: Create a starting heightmap
A heightmap is a greyscale image where the brightness of each pixel gives the elevation at that point. For Gaea2, this needs to be square.
If you have already created a topography map, you can use it to create a heightmap. You could skip straight to the erosion steps, but the output can look a little too perfect and uniform. It is best to use the topography as a guide, but break it up using custom brushes.
Personally, I have purchased this brush set from Joshua Goff Visual’s Patreon, which really are the best I’ve seen. There are some free sample brushes also available on his Patreon. There are free options from Shortvalleyhiker here and here, but require additional work to get natural looking mountains.
We first create a land plate, either from an existing reference or starting fresh. This is simply a flat grey for the land, and black for the surrounding water. Texture brushes are used to add interesting variation to the lowlands, and mountain brushes used to place large mountain ranges
Including rivers previously added to a 2D map usually kills realism. I will not include this as part of the main tutorial, but can revisit it in the future if people require it.
Step 2a: (Optionally) Create Biome Masks
If you have classified different biomes for your terrain, or you have them as an output from tools like Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator, you can create rough black and white masks for each biome. This is an image per biome with the same dimensions as your heightmap, with white areas denoting that particular biome, and black elsewhere. These can be used in one of the Gaea2 project files available on our Discord
Step 2b: (Optionally) Use Wilbur to erode mountains
Gaea2 can be used to generate large scale maps, but it does struggle to generate realitic looking mountain ranges at it’s maximum scale of 2,400km. Consensus amongst the Kilroy’s Kartography Discord Community is that Wilbur actually produces nicer results for large scale erosion.
This is particularly recommended if you have not used some sort of mountain brush on your input heightmap, and have a simple topography representation
Step3: Gaea
Wilbur does a “better” job of creating interesting shapes by cutting in to the mountain ridges, particularly when you have just used a topographic maps as input. However when we load the output of Wilbur into Gaea2, seeing the heightmap in 3D for the first time reveals a lumpy mess.
Using one of my free project files, the final heightmap from the erosion steps can be seen in image 2. Gaea’s handling of erosion and sedimentation gives a much more visually appealing result, while maintaing most of the details.
Images 3 and 4 demonstrate the most powerful aspect of Gaea’s use in map making!
This example map is a regional map, so you can see the elevation of the mountains. For larger scale maps, a realistic look will mean you can barely determine the elevation. So what’s the point of making a 3D map if it looks flat anyway?
The answer is to generate texture using the height information. Identifying slope, flows, peaks, soil that all influence the colour of the terrain. Gaea even has the ability to use the height to “erode” the colours, showing how rain can wash the colour from high sloped areas into the lowlands. This is key to creating realistic and visually appealing terrain, and all done through simulation, not artistic talent.
If you have biome masks from a previous step, you can use a specific version of the Gaea 2.0 project file to make use of them
Step 4: Blender
Blender’s main purpose is for creating gorgeous artistic shots and animations of your map. In my work, I have found that the output straight out of Gaea’s LightX node gives the best detail and clarity.
But if you want anything like atmosphere, clouds, a globe, and angle other than perfectly downward from above, then you need to consider using Blender (or Houdini or UE5)
Getting ready to dive in
Right now we are at base camp, and we can see the summit ahead. I hope it has been helpful to see this high level view, soon we will start the ascent!
