The Crimean War in colour - How to use the model

First you need software for modelling a terrain (or heightfield or Digital Elevation Model).  Some of these programmes are free (e.g. 3DEM, MICRODEM) but the maps in The Crimean War were made with Daylon Leveller.  These programmes allow you to view a terrain (a 3D picture of a land surface) from different angles. 

Next you need terrain data. Terrain modelling programmes can open files in a variety of formats, some of which come from satellites with various types of 3D mapping devices.  The starting data for The Crimean War came from the NASA SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission).  SRTM data for most of the world is available free from the internet.  Arrangements were also made to switch on the 3D cameras on the ASTER satellite while it was over the Crimea.  This should in theory have given data with a better resolution, but the results were unsatisfactory. Possibly these ASTER images have been post processed and improved by now so if you are interested check the ASTER site.  A lot of post-processing was done on the SRTM data, including rebuilding mountains altered by quarrying since 1854 and removing land reclaimed from the sea.  Some Perlin noise was added to create a random bumpy effect.  The software exports the data in various formats which are friendlier than the satellite files. The simplest format is a greyscale picture in which a pixel's brightness is proportional to the height at that point.  This can be in .tif, .bmp, or .png format and some other programmes will open these.  On the downloads page you will also find a USGS DEM file which will import into many terrain modelling programmes.

Some terrain management software (e.g. Bryce) allows you to install buildings and even objects like ships and cannon which have hidden spaces and so cannot be represented realistically by a heightfield.  The data used in The Crimean War maps sticks to simple heightfeld format which uses bumps in the ground to represent buildings and fortifications.  That's why they are pointy and don't look good up close.  This technique could be used to represent tents, trenches and villages like Kamara, Kadikoi and Balaclava (see discussion of masks below)

To decorate the heightfield you need a texture and some masks.  The texture is the coloured skin that fits on the ground surface.  Masks are files that can be used to isolate various parts of the texture for processing.  Many terrain programmes will generate a texture automatically for you, e.g. by making the colour depend on the height.  The basic colours in the Daylon Leveller model were made like this, using a custom "colour map" which has not survived. (The colour map was an attempt to imagine the ground 150 years ago when the Crimea was apparently a much more arid place and there was little vegetation)./Then the texture was exported like peeling the skin off the top to make a 2D picture which was improved by an image or photo processing programme and loaded back into Leveller as a texture file.  Daylon Leveller is also very good at making and using masks.  The buildings and fortifications of Sebastopol were made by making masks from old maps with an image/photo processing programme and then using them to raise parts of the heightfield.  The "slope dependent" mask-creation feature of Leveller was used to make a mask that was imported to an image programme on top of the colour-map texture and used to add a limestone-coloured fill to the steeper slopes.  The slopes selected were from 10 to 90 degrees with those between 40 and 90 degrees fully selected.  The fill was R219 G213 B164.

Shaded Relief Maps

Shaded relief maps are overhead views of the terrain with the lighting in a suitable position for showing the relief. The US National Park Service used to have some good tips on the internet about creating such maps.  The maps in The Crimean War (which have no texture except light and shade) were made with Bryce's "render to disk" process, with legends etc. added afterwards in an image processor.