Wasteland Map

[Tarinaky]

Most of the map advice I've found has been for fantasy worlds and the kinds of continental scales that involves.

I'm interested in trying to produce a wasteland map. Ideally of the ruins of a fictitious city - about the same scale as a modern megacity (London, New York... etc...).

I've seen some tutorials for producing fractal heightmaps in GIMP using Difference Clouds and 'Oilify' but I haven't been able to get the kinds of output the tutorial writers did - and I'm really not happy about that.

I suffer from 'programmer art' and I'd really like to develop myself in this area.

[fizzybobnewt]

It sounds like you want to do it yourself, but I feel I should mention a thread where you could request maps made.

[Tarinaky]

I won't learn anything if someone else does it all for me now will I?

Being told how someone else would do it? Very useful.

[Jair Barik]

Depends on how it was wasted.

General rule of thumb though make a map of your ficticous city then work from there. Make various districts, monuments, important social buildings etc.

When wasting it I'd then generally do the following things.
-Reduce the size of rivers/eliminate them entirely leaving ravines.
-Monuments leave them as be, perhaps destroy a localised area nearby where a part has fallen off of it.
-Residential districts/shopping districts etc. destroy some of these leaving craters/ areas of minimal cover for some terrain variety.
-Bridges. Don't do it to all but remove midsections of some and leave others at odd angles.

[Irbis]

You need craters. Lots of them :P