I'm working on a project that needs an island a few kilometers across to be mapped in some detail. Not in terms of buildings and such, but nice, realistic looking terrain at about the same level of detail you would get from high-res satellite pics. Anyone out there who is good with Bryce, Terragen or any of the other terrain modeling programs? And willing to work for cheap? If so, fire me a message. Alternately, I might be convinced to go with a more abstract Settlers of Catan kind of look if you can show me some examples of how well you can do it.

Greg Porter
BTRC games

There's always the real world...

Figi for example...
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-17.889887,177.95929&spn=1.372216,1.738586&t=k&om=1

Or the island on the northeast corner of Tasmania...
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=-40.11589,148.120422&spn=1.102737,1.738586

Flip/mirror as needed, and people will be hard pressed to tell the difference. (my dad used to tell me the story of some history class where they discussed water rights for a suburb where the lakefront owners blocked off the beach from the public. Turns out it was based on a flipped transparancy of Isrial/Palestine.)

Yep, been trying that route. Problem is, I need an island only a few kilometers long, mostly or completely uninhabited, yet photographed in high res. I can find a lot of islands that meet my size and emptiness criteria, but none so far that are at a decent resolution. I'm sure they are out there, but looking at various Google Earth blogs and web pages has not turned up any yet.

Greg
BTRC

There are quite a few programs now that will generate terrain for you according to various principles. For a singel island, they could do a pretty good job (for whole planets, they're often unconvincing since they don't have anything to model tectonics and other big geologic processes).

Fractal Terrains is one, and you can buy it on RPGNow or try a free demo. There are some other commercial ones available, and some less comprehensive free ones. If you're willing to user many smaller, specialized programs and feed the data through, you can get good results.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=74.772813,114.257812&q=Isle+Royale&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=47.996814,-88.846436&spn=0.510028,0.892639

Isle Royale, in Lake Superior.  Officially in Michigan, but very very close to Canada.  I don't know how much resolution you need, but it's legitimately empty, save for elk, wolves and day-tourists.  Lots of good photos available too if you need them via the National Parks Service.

Thanks. Right now I'm looking for high resolution passes of land that also cross bodies of water, and looking for islands in the gaps. I think I have enough canidates now (the one you linked to is not sufficient resolution, though). Now I have to cut and manipulate chunks of terrain to make the island I want out of the pieces of several places. I am slowly finding the forests and shorelines and rocky outcrops I'm looking for. It's just more work than I figured it would be.

Greg Porter

http://biology.usgs.gov/npsveg/isro/photos.pdf

You'll still have to cut and paste, but there's a map to indicate how they all fit together.  It's landsat near-infrared imagery though.  It's weird to look at because of the false color, but it tells you a lot of information about what you're looking at.  For instance, the more brilliant the red, the healthier the vegetation.  Blue areas have no living material, or at least no vegetative material.  The pictures overlap somewhat (click anywhere on the dashed lines and you'll get the pictures between the red crosses), so that the USGS can make accurate maps from the images.

Likely to still not be what you want, but I thought that I'd point it out.

Also found this: http://ims.rsgis.msu.edu/viewer.htm

At least for Isle Royal they had detailed satelite imagery already layed out (ariel backgrounds), but presumably they would have it for other locations as well.  They also had USGS maps (other backgrounds).  It looks to be restricted to Michigan, but Michigan has a fair number of islands so you could make out pretty well.