Now there’s a sentence one doesn’t usually expect to type.

Mark Mitchell contacted me a couple months ago, and then again just this week, to inform me of his ambitious project to create a realistic heightmap of Britannia using such tools as Photoshop, Terragen, and L3DT.

This in turn would be useful for some Ultima project developers, since I know for a fact that tools exist for some game engines (Neverwinter Nights 2 especially) that allow for the automatic creation of terrain based on imported heightmaps.

But that’s not the reason Mark has undertaken this project for himself. As he creates this work, he also wants to consider: “size and scaling of the continent, political and demographic issues, economy and trade routes, [and] geology and land formation.” In that regard, it’s as much an anthropological study as it is a really cool piece of artwork.

You can check out some of his sample work at the project’s current “webpage,” a forum thread at the Cartographer’s Guild (registration required). I have also created a project entry, at/through which can be viewed an early sample of Mark’s work.

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