Thread: Rolahend: Starting of a Campaign world.

Looks great. Very nice coastlines. A few thoughts:

The landforms are very natural looking. The south-west peninsula of the north-west island reminds me a lot of the Avalon Peninsular in Nova Scotia, what with the tiny isthmus connecting it to the rest of the island and all.

The island groups in the southeast seem to run along three straight lines. It looks a bit odd, since I expect islands groups to form more of an arch.

The map seems to be neatly divided into four quadrants. That introduces a slight level of artificiality to the map design that subtly jars with the natural looking coasts. It just looks a bit too symmetrical and planned. Moving the southern of the two north-eastern islands west-south-west a bit and introducing some arch to the southeastern archipeligos would go a long way toward making the land placement look a bit more natural to my eye.

All in all though, a great map. I really like the color you used for your ocean. What is it?

I'm thinking of deleting the southeast islands all together, and introducing a larger landmass connecting the middle east and south west islands.

As for the blue, the map is drawn on a parchment texture background that was made while playing with the Dry Media brushes in Photoshop Elements, which really just gives a less random layered cloud effect. (You can see it on the land, which I'm not sure if I will colour or not. The water was just done with a 50% Opacity blue layer (Actual colour in photoshop was RGB 69,75,147)

I'm thinking of doing a fade effect, copying the blue layer, changing it to darker blue, and then basically smudging it away from the coastline. Apply a Gaussian Blur, and merge.

Originally Posted by DanChops

The island groups in the southeast seem to run along three straight lines. It looks a bit odd, since I expect islands groups to form more of an arch.

The map seems to be neatly divided into four quadrants. That introduces a slight level of artificiality to the map design that subtly jars with the natural looking coasts. It just looks a bit too symmetrical and planned. Moving the southern of the two north-eastern islands west-south-west a bit and introducing some arch to the southeastern archipeligos would go a long way toward making the land placement look a bit more natural to my eye.

All in all though, a great map. I really like the color you used for your ocean. What is it?

I agree with Dan. The islands in the lower right seem a bit to regular. My mind neatly forms a rectangle around the islands and it looks a bit "off".

I am ok with the rest of it though. I think the large island between the I & II quadrant breaks up the look enough in the top half of the map and the islands do the same in the lower half.

Looks like a very light violet type color with a turbulent bump map that was then blurred 2-3 px or so. Theres even another texture that makes it seem like he has more than one layer of bumpmaps involved, perhaps one with a small bit of plasma? But that could also be jpg compression artifacts also... not sure.