[WIP] Atlas Maps of Valmere | From Real-World Height Data to Vector Map

[morne]

Minor update:

Still working on getting the map situated in QGIS. Definitely learning a lot. Also, was unhappy with a few sections of the DEM being a little too "round," so I added some erosion with Gaea. In the meantime, here's a quicky map showing major lakes on the continent of Kador, calculated using QGIS (because why not):

kador_lakes_area.jpg

[morne]

Another quick update here. Still messing with QGIS. I've started to experiment with GRASS tools to calculate optimal routes through terrain to give me some decent looking automated roads. I think this method works less if you are trying to get highways, railways, and the like, since this basically tries to avoid steep terrain at all costs.

Anyways, here you can see a small portion of my map.

0.PNG

First thing I did was generate a "travel cost" map, basically representing how "hard" it is to travel at certain points. For this, I used r.slope.aspect on my base DEM, and combined that with a rivers, lakes, and ocean mask. This travel cost map looks like:

1.PNG

Next, I used r.walk, passing in my DEM and travel cost map, to generate a cumulative cost map from the city Azherk to Roktoum. This ends up looking like this:

2.PNG

Lastly, I used r.drain, passing in my DEM and directional map from r.walk, to generate the actual road, starting at Roktoum and "draining" to the black area of the cumulative cost map. After some generous smoothing, I end up with this:

3.PNG

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. For this to be a viable solution, I think I need to create an input that defines which cities are "neighbors" of other cities, and write a script that will follow this process for each unique pair of neighbors. If I had to do each pair manually, like I have been, I may as well just draw roads by hand. There's probably an opportunity to use Dijkstra's algorithm in there somewhere, too. Another issue is overlapping roads where they should converge, like in my example. Honestly, the easiest solution there is manual editing.

If anyone is actually reading this, let me know what you think!