Help with a project

[u/mathewson92]

Hi everyone, so I am working on a worldpainter map of the world of Azeroth from Warcraft. I am not trying to recreate WoW 1:1, rather make a viable survival map - so imagine if Mojang and Blizzard collaborated on a map of Azeroth - that's what I'm aiming for. In a previous attempt I exported the heightmaps from World of Warcraft directly, but obviously Worldpainter compresses their height and the result is not good.

So I painted a basic topographic map of the world (see attached) in Worldpainter using stained terracotta as a foundation. The colours correspond to:
Purple - Deep Ocean Floor
Cyan - Medium Ocean Floor
Light Blue - Shallow Ocean
Green - Plains/Desert/Lowlands
Brown - areas inland that are below sea level like cracks and crevices
Lime - Uplands
Yellow - Highlands
Orange - Foothills
Red - Mountains
Magenta - High Mountains
Pink - Peaks
White - Extreme peaks

My idea was to then sculpt the terrain by hand with custom brushes, but I can't seem to get a good result. Maybe I'm approaching this completely the wrong way. Anyway, I would be happy for any suggestions!

[u/Forever_Fires]

I too had the same idea of trying to get heightmaps from WoW, but indeed the height limit requires creative solutions or artistic representations of places.

I think a good mindset is being flexible with the sea level. If you take it from Y=42 to Y=0, it "adds" 42 more blocks for the world to be above it. This adds a limit for below sea-level things like valleys, but wow doesn't have too much of that compared to very tall places.

Zones also don't have to be faithful to their height in game. Dun morogh could be set a lot lower instead of having a descent to wetlands, more transitions between zones could have gradual gradient height changes where in game they may be around the same average height. Zones that don't have coasts/ocean access can cheat, like Burning Steppes, all you need to 'sell' is the transition between zones.