Did you try contacting the author(s) of the papers? In my experience, most authors are happy to hear about uses of their work (even if they are in a...
It sounds like you're interested in browsing portfolios, so feel free to view my fantasy map portfolio and see if anything stands out to you, some of...
There are lots of tools out there that can do hillshading on available DEMs. QGIS is one option. A reasonable dataset for maps of the US is ETOPO2.
...
Hello Maximillian and welcome to the guild. As for software I think try out all of the free ones first and get a general sense of what works for you....
I got started by putting together a hide texture. It's a combination of several textures, some my own hand-made stuff, a couple from Shutterstock and...