Creating polygon elevation contours?

Question

I'd like to create polygon shapefiles to communicate elevation information on regional maps. I find these draped over a hill shade layer provide one of the best base maps.

I can tell some cartographers are creating these by hand by digitizing vector features over raster maps, but others are clearly created automatically.

Currently, I am using the following procedure:

1. Convert contour lines from a single part to multipart
2. Polygonize multipart contour lines
3. Join contour data to new polygonized contours
4. classify based on elevation
5. simplify as required

I'm having a couple of problems creating these layers (in QGIS):

1. Creating polygons from closed contour lines (not line segments) is fine, but if the line has a start and end point, it is not a feature with an area that I can create a polygon from.
2. Contour interval data is dropped during conversion, so I have to join the original contour lines to the new polygons to include this information.

I think I have ways around all these problems, but I'd like a quick and easy way to do these conversions since it's a procedure I plan to do for many locations.

Does anyone know of a script that may expedite this process, or a guide demonstrating the preferred way to achieve this result?

Answer 1

In order to accomplish this more efficiently, as commenters have proposed:

QGIS:

1. Acquire raster elevation data of appropriate resolution (image 1)
2. If necessary, downsample the raster (result image 2)
3. Upsample (interpolate) that raster (result image 3)
4. Apply a discrete color ramp in the Style panel-> Add color ramp -> cpt-city (image 4)
5. Hillshade with the upsampled raster as needed

*The result is aesthetic but this method is not very quantitative, i.e. only for appearance

*****Consider also utilizing and supporting Natural Earth and other open layers (not affiliated).