Thread: Beothar

I think the texture you applied to the mountains is a bit to strong which gives the mountains they current 'gnawed at by a mathematical rodent look'. The underlying shapes are interesting and I think the close and deep texture sort of distracts the eye. Reducing the depth of the texture might help.

Njordys, did you use RobA's tutorial Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map? I ask because it appears that your base land texture wasn't the Render Cloud Noise filter. Either that or you selected something else to use for your Bump Map than the tutorial reads. I can't quite say if it's your grass bump map or your mountains bump map because there is some of the same texture in the grass areas as is on your mountain regions. I could be off base, all this is new to me as well, after all, but I've been working on my own project following RobA's regional map tutorial and my results are rather different than yours. Not to say that there's anything wrong with yours, I actually like your land mass shapes and your mountain texture is neat though I find it a bit too regular personally. I'd suggest narrowing down what layer contributes to your mountain texture (you can turn on/off layer visibility pretty easily using the 'eye' toggle on the layer listing) and see about playing with the settings that generated that layer. See if that helps and if I'm wrong I'll happily listen to those who have a better handle on this hobby.

Thanks for replies guys

Yeah, I was inspired by the tutorial, but played a bit freely myself, not following the tutorial by the letter but experimenting. Now I've been trying to smooth it a little, blending mountains a bit more with the terrain. Here is a new working edition of this map

The second version looks a lot better. Aliasing on the coastlines is still very obvious though.

The alignments in your mountains look a bit odd; all the strongest peaks are e-w, while the lower mountainous areas have a ne-sw banding. Real ranges would have any alignment consistent across a given range, and maybe smoothly varying not dead straight.