Thread: Restructuring a continent

I took your descriptions and drew them out on my own. I think you only need to move Naam south with the other tropical climates and then put some mountains between Al Haren and Orkando in order to put Orkando into a rain shadow (mountains block the rain so it turns dry). Of course if this was situated like North America then Orkando would be like Florida and prone to hurricanes and would have swamps. So to prevent that you need those mountains to block off any moisture coming in from the western jungle of Al Haren. Aldarand will be a huge nation in order to cover the many climates. My sketch looks bad and my writing is bad, but it's late. This is just a very general guide.

Thanks Ascension ! With the different lines you put for the climate that seems to work, I'll just move things a little and smooth out climate between territories. I'll keep thinking about all this tho.

Also, while I'm at it. I've got an additional question. I've gathered a few elements from the forums to start my map, textures, brushes, and such. The world we're talking about here is really huge and I'd really like to do a detailed map of all of it which of course, will take a long time. But I'm patient and not in a rush. I don't have a tablet and I'm pretty sure the best solution for the shape of the continent would be to draw it on paper and scan it. But with such a big continent that I will probably do in a few thousands pixels by a few thousand pixels (oh yeah, what's the maximum I could go in pixel without overdoing it ?) I think it'd be best to draw each territory separated and assemble them in Photoshop, right ? And would 8x11 sheet be ok ? Sharpie, regular pencil ?

P.S: Igloos made me laugh !

The size of pixels you can have totally depends on the power of your PC. If you have a lot of RAM and a good graphics card you can go nuts. I'll tell you from my own experience my machine was not up to much. I had built this thing originally with FPS gaming in mind as well as a few MMO's however a machine built for that is pretty much pansy compared with what you will need for doing any kind of real artwork. I was totally blown away by how pathetic my PC chugged when I started working on a large map. What you might do is check out some of the maps done by others and find a sizing that looks good for what you want and try that. If it's too slow when you are saving things or making changes then you either need to upgrade or cut it down into chunks.

Of course, the pixel resolution you choose has a big effect on how large you can go. If you just want it for your computer screen you might be totally happy with 100ppi but if you want to print it out all super crispy you better think more around 300ppi. Pixels Per Inch will certain effect the file size of your map and that will of course effect the speed of your machine as you are working on it. I can tell you from experience that it really blows to be in full artistic flow and suddenly get stymied by a chugging machine that totally kills off your momentum.

You might take a look at the maps done by a few of the expert map makers here and then try a size comparable with something you like and see how it goes.

The map I just started is roughly 8000 x 4000 pixels in size and when I tried to save it as an uncompressed jpeg a box came up saying I didn't have enough RAM.

I'd say that 2k x 2k would be ok for a continental map and a series of regional maps. You could even go smaller than that probably. It all depends on how much detail you want in there. If you want to pick out individual trees and buildings then you're gonna need to make the map pretty big.

Well I got a beast here... 3 To of hard drive, 9 Gb of DDR3 ram and two ATI Radeon 4800 in dual mode as graphic cards ! With liquid cooling system of course ! I'll go up to 5000x5000 that'll give me plenty of space to work. In the worst case I'll just do the map territory by territory and put them together after.

P.S: Ramah I'm completely fond of your style, I'll found a few brushes of your mountains, trees and hills. Do you mind me using that ?

Of course not. That's what they're there for.

Lezales, if you like Ramah's style check out his 'tree thing' program, it's just fantastic!

Also, in terms of your continental shape, check out Old Guys tutorial on creating realistic coastlines. You can always print out an initial run with that and then detail the bits you want using a black sharpie and scan the result.

With the pc you have you should be able to go 25,000 by 12,500 with no problem....because I can go that size but things take like 2-3 minutes when performing filters in PS.