Making of Qaliste

[J.Edward]

Both are good, imho. The greyscale version is veyr easy-to-read but lacks the pleasant "antique" feeling of the other.

Yeah, to get the contrast you lose a bit of subtlety. A truer Greyscale would have to have been done from the start as grey, and not adjusted like this one was.

Well, the DTMs I'm speaking of are not real 3D objects. They're in fact grey-scale 2D images, interpolated by an algorithm.

So, I think you've found a faster and better way to get better result than you could get in any ordinary GIS software.

As regards real 3D, I totally agree with you: since I worked as a cartographer till 2011, I dealt with 3D data within a cartographic CAD (GCarto) which can manage 3D polylines. I may say that experience was quite brainstorming!

However, I think heightfields are good enough to get fake 3D.

Okay, I get what you saying - like a height field image. I used to make HF maps but was never satisfied with how they came out in Terragen or Vue.
Of course I was always trying to hand paint those that I did and was not as skilled back then.

It does offer a lot of freedom being able to do them in this new style, though having the 3d to get any view you want would be great.