In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth...

Origin's motto may be, "We create worlds", but they aren't the only ones who do it. Here is how I actually created the new map for Quintiqua.

First,  I took Melanie's original source, a scanned, hand-drawn sketch, and loaded it into Photoshop. Any paint program would probably work, but if you have any involvement in graphics whatsoever, you probably ought to invest in Photoshop. Even though it is rather expensive, you won't be sorry.

Okay, once the image is in Photoshop, I roughly blocked in all the regions of the map, like in the image below (this is a really small pic. The original is approx 1200x1200 pixels).

After blocking in the rough layout of the land, I then began going over it with the dodge and burn tool, as well as the blur and distort tool, building up and bringing down the values, until I wound up with an image like the one below.

The next step was to load this image into a landscape program I use, called VistaPro. Now then, VistaPro reads the grayscale values of the image as altitude data, varying from 0 (black) to 255 (white) in altitude, and creates a 3D model based on that data, with one pixel representing one polygon on the landscape.

The term bump mapping might come to the minds of some of you, however bump mapping is a rendering trick, designed to give smooth surfaces a bumpy look without having to create more complex geometry. Bump mapping looks fine as long as the camera is above or below the bump mapped surface, but the illusion falls apart as you get closer to an edge on view of the surface which has been bump mapped. VistaPro and other landscape rendering programs read the gray values of an image, and create actual geometry, making the model orders of magnitude more complex, but with much better visual quality. In the case above, it created a model of approximately a million and a half polygons!

Alright, once the map has been imported into VistaPro, it needed some tweaking, adjusting scaling, adding some randomized roughness, lighting adjustment, and setting factors like tree and snow lines, sea level, etc.

After showing Melanie some renders, going back to Photoshop and altering the original map, and then re-rendering, I came up with the following image:

Now, while this image is somewhat close to what Melanie wanted, there were some things wrong with it, like the green landscape in the bowl of the pit, the icy western plains being a big sandbox, and the glacier looking like a big brown pile of dirt.

So, its back into Photoshop for a little manipulation, then drawing in the roads, overlaying text, drawing in some graphic effects like smoke, mist, flying dragons, etc, before I wound up with the final (?) image shown below.

Total approximate working time: ~20-30 hours.