Gojira, I don't believe it is OT to discuss mapping in the mapping thread. Just my opinion.
I use various mapping techniques, depending on the map. For my Western US map, I took a high contrast terrain map and repainted it with the bmp to bic colors then rendered it with that program. The result was nearly photo-realistic on the minimap, though it took a few weeks to add rivers, trees and land mark features to it.
When I redid the fictional world of Barsoom, however, I used a different method, overlaying a grid over a hand-drawn map and then placing terrain square by square. Painstaking, but required less fixing on the back end, so may have been less work overall. There is a full discussion of the process I used >
here< . I made this image of it with labels for the SP guys:
Doing Barsoom taught me a little trick that I used when I did Gotham City recently for King Arthurs's Superhero Mod: Again, I was working from a line-drawn map (see it >
here<). To do that map I first turned it on it's side, then reduced the sized to 100 by 100 so that it would render in b2b. I turned it into a two color outline, using the "water" and "grassland" colors from the bmp to bic program, then (and this is the trick) squeezed it a little thinner than it was originally, so that it has the appearance of more perspective :
After I rendered it, I put it in the Map Tweaker and lopped much of the bottom off.
The result looks less like a map than an aerial view:
These are evidence of the sad truth about maps: there is no single way to do it, save that I've found the bmp2bic program and the Map Tweaker extremely useful in each instance.