Thread: Map Experiments

Probably the first thing one notices is that the forests and cities etc are in perspective, whereas the shaded relief isn't. Either both should be perspective views, or neither should.

Apart from that I've never even tried making a representational map so I'll leave the rest to those who have... >.>

I had to look up shaded relief. I think what you are saying is that the trees and city brushes that Ramah made cast shadows at an angle to account for the sun, but Pasis's technique of using textures and effects to create landscapes clashes with that. If am an interpreting that right then I need to add light and shadow the the landscape to get these two styles to mix better. Not sure if there is a fancy photoshop effect that can help with that or if it would all need to be done manually.

Kind of. The hills/mountains etc are the shaded relief. At present they look a bit like a satellite image—as though the viewer is positioned directly overhead. The trees and cities, on the other hand, not only cast shadows but are in profile, as though the viewer is positioned on the ground looking at them. Those two styles therefore can't mix because the viewer can't actually be in two places at once. I would thus either redo the trees/cities so that we see only the tops of the trees and the roofs of the houses/castles etc, with no drop shadows, or redo the hills/mountains as profile representations (e.g. big triangles or whatever).

If you want to keep the mountains as they are but integrate them better with the rest you'd probably have to tilt them to appear three-dimensional, which I'm not completely sure how to do. (Whenever I've tried using the perspective tool on GIMP it doesn't yield results anything like what I'm imagining :c)