Thread: First map ever

Hej Dickovdk,

and congratulations on your first map, it looks good - a subdued palette the ocean a little purple. Can't help but think potatoes when seing your eastern country ... I'd throw in some rivers (as you mentioned yourself) a compass rose (you can get one from my signature) and a scale and call it done ... or you could also add some cities and borders and such

A little advice on posting your maps inhere - we really appreciate when you use the "go advanced" button and use our uploader for your maps - that way if the site you post on now ever dissapears, your maps will still be here cause they are hosted on our own servers. ... and have some rep for your first map ever with my +8 mace of nice repping KAZAMM

First of thanks for the comments.

I actually had a rose on the map but disliked it a lot so it was "killed" off yesterday evening - River will come (Next thing to take care of)

As for the city + borders etc. Well the image is 1680x1120 or something like that. I will then Zoom in on there continents and add those details on seperate maps. (well thats the idea at least).

as for the uploading stuff, never thought about that - other forums normally wants liked materiale due to hard disk but sure thing I will modify it and get up placed correctly.

once again thanks for the comments.

oh yes .. Poteaos might be a bit of a potatoe - didnt think about that when I was out walking the dog last night while making up names!

This turned out quite nicely... no critiques from me (as Tilt pretty much covered them).

Woops! I hit submit on the rep without putting in a reason, so I'll put it here. Agreed, tilt covered everything I would have said as well. Have some rep for a great first map!

Very Nice repped

Have been fiddling around with rivers yesterday - however I couldnt get it to work. I checked up on Tear's guide and went step by step using path and layers for the river. However the outcome was crappy. The map size is around 1680*1120 as mentioned before however that do provide some problems when i want to blow it up to make details.
I tried to resize 400% (both ways) to a staggering 1.2GB psd file - it looked acceptable except for the coastline which was an absolut horror.

Having learned from that I am thinking there are 2 ways of approaching my problems.
first one is live with it - this I find hard but I honestly am pretty pleased (specially after corrections of the colour "purple" to more bluish and adding measurement + compass rose)
second approach will be restart : this is not really a problem but I would like to know how to make sure I dont end up the same way with "second try". When you folks make a world map - do you make it bit by bit and clue it all together in the end in one HUGE file, or do you fight with enormous files having the computer screaming in pain at all times ?

OH yes as a finale note : The Continent Potatoes have been renamed by some old sage that claim the ancient people called it something different (cant remember what I ended up with - probably Carrot-topia)

Then comes the naming stuff - I have looked at peoples maps and people seem to have found a way to make COOL natural looking texts - are there any tutorial available on that or any guidelines out there ?!?

thanks for all the interest by the way!

For place names (I hate thinking of place names)

There's a section on toponomy in the guild,
and there are a load of place name generators on the web, like this one.
and one of guild members, Alfr (also from Denmark as it happens) has created a really cool program called word builder which you can get here.

Originally Posted by ravells

For place names (I hate thinking of place names)

There's a section on toponomy in the guild,
and there are a load of place name generators on the web, like this one.
and one of guild members, Alfr (also from Denmark as it happens) has created a really cool program called word builder which you can get here.

Oh its not really the "imagination" of naming thats the issue - I just make them up as I go along - some a bit stolen other just insane combo in my mind (which can end up with potatoe ) - nah it was more ment ON the map in terms of actual TEXTURE. One of the things I really dislike on my map was the font and how "dominating" they are - one thing I have noticed is people use bending the words a lot (which looks cool) and make them somewhat transparent - I will have to work with that for a greater look!

On the huge file issue: I use Gimp rather than Photoshop(i assume you're using PS since Tear's tut is pretty much PS-only) so I use RobA's file-linked layers to automate this process, but it works just as well by hand: I start with one file, and make the coastline channel and the ocean. I save that file as Ocean.xcf (or .psd as the case may be) and also save a copy as ocean.png. Then I save as Land.xcf, merge/delete ALL the ocean layers so that I end up with one layer for the ocean, and make the land in more layers on top of that. Save, save as png, save as new type, merge all previous into one, make the next. I usually end up with files for ocean, land, cities, border, cartouche ... etc. Then at the end i just put all those pngs i made into a composite file and i'm done.

On fonts, dafont.com is your friend. tons of free fonts to choose from in a ton of different types.