I've been following the work of Anna Meyer for years (it was her who pointed me at Other World Mapper) and one of the things that has made her Greyhawk map so awesome is that she made it in 3D. You can't really notice it so much, from her top down views, but she occasionally shows fans a side-on view.
Recently she has been working with something called World Machine. It is an awesome program, but it is also a complicated program.
If Other World Mapper can make 2D cartography easier for people, I'm figuring that the next generation of Other World Mapper could look into doing the same sort of thing with 3D cartography. If the OWM team could do that, they could bring the advantages of 3D maps into the reach of people who are less good at cartography software and give a lot of people the ability to express their creativity.
The big advantages of 3D cartography (over 2D cartography) are:
- Mountains can be given real height (rather than just being symbols on a 2D map),
- Valleys and lakes can cut into the landscape (meaning that things that don't show up so well on 2D maps, like slopes can actually be included on maps),
- Different "flat" locations on a continent or an island can all have different heights above sea level (which might help someone building a world work out what sort of trees and plants to put onto the lowlands and highlands),
- Rivers can be made to flow downhill from the mountains, though lakes to the sea.
OWM version 1 is already working towards having things like rivers and lakes that interact and work together. I think that if OWM could eventually migrate to having a third dimension in the way it creates maps, it would be possible for lakes to automatically turn into scooped out areas of the land and for rivers to automatically turn into thin grooves cut into the land. Given the cool stuff the OWN team already does, I think that you have the skills to do this sort of thing, even though I know it isn't part of the current plan. I do realise that it would probably require every single feature of OWM to be reworked so that the 2D interaction was replaced with 3D interaction.
Mountains could maybe automatically throw up a number of random peaks (with height) but the zoom in ability could maybe allow users to pull the peaks around a bit to allow someone to make a shape of mountains that fitted in with their vision (like a curved range of mountains that they call "The Horseshoe Mountains").
As well as making the rivers "work", a 3D map would also allow someone to navigate over their map and work out how high every city, town, village or other community was above sea level. Being able to use a map to get that sort of data back could be useful for world building.
Things like roads would probably be a bit easier, as they sit on the land. But if someone is trying to design land that goes up, with some hills and cliffs, a road might actually need to snake about a bit. On the zoomed out scale, that might not show up so much, but if people can zoom in, a road that follows the most shallow gradient might have a more realistic feel to it.
And if somebody can manipulate OWM's tools to create a situation where features like mountains, valleys and rivers create an obstacle and there is only one logical place where something like a bridge can go, it can help create a scenario where a critter like a troll has gained control of a bridge and is cutting off the route between two communities.
Anyhoo, I thought I would drop the idea and see if anyone else would want Other World Mapper to eventually move in this direction.
