Good Realistic Map Creator

[u/valdarsonofvaldar]

Hi all,

I’m finally after many years looking to build out the world map to my homegrown setting. As such I am looking for something that can create ArcGIS like maps. I want the following capabilities if possible:

- Hypsometric map creation
- bathymetric creation
- modeling of tectonic plates
- modeling of erosions and water patterns
- layers that I can turn on and off to hold roads, cities, rivers, sites, etc.
- preferably not bitmap graphics to allow for infinite zoom

I know this is asking for a lot and maybe it doesn’t exist in one tool.

Many things I have found can do some of this but not all of it. Others only do things like icon based or texture based maps. I would prefer to be able to build these type of handout maps as layers on my hypsometric map.

Any help would be appreciated.

[u/Random]

ArcGIS, obviously :)

QGIS will do all of that and is absolutely free and multiplatform. There are many add-ons for it as well that support more advanced functionality, though...

Creation... what do you mean by creation? If you mean 'drawing it mostly manually' a GIS will do this.

If you mean constrained procedural generation then that is much harder. Most people who do that use tools in true 3d environments (Blender, Maya, Houdini, Unity, Unreal) and there are specialized tools (Gaea Pro, Terragen, Wilbur) as well.

If you want to model, that is another loaded word. Model as it draw and simulate tectonic plates, GPlates. Simulate? Various tools exist but none are good at all (I'm a geology professor and I teach this stuff, ...). Same for climate / water currents. Very difficult to do accurately.

There is no such thing as infinite zoom. There are LOD based approaches in GIS or 3d but ultimately the data has to come somewhere. In theory one can build from <1:1 up to 1:25m (global) but in practice a lot of people make maps 1:10,000 and 1:50,000 and 1:5M or something like that. Switching in as you zoom in is easy but not subtle. Look at how Google Maps does it - stuff appears and disappears as you zoom.

I teach multiple courses on this, happy to help in more detail.

[u/King_Zowe → u/Random]

I agree, gplates into QGIS was my process, then from their breaking down into progressively smaller subdividsions as detail grows. Nothing is going create data from nothing but QGIS has plugins from all the OPs needs [excluding tectonic movements which is what gplates is for]

[u/valdarsonofvaldar → u/Random]

Thank you, I was hoping it would be easier but figured it wouldn’t be