WIP-Ghoraja Juun - Continent of Ashtalarea

Here's my latest, this is a "Frankenstein's Monster" of sorts when it comes to techniques. I used bits and pieces of both Ascension's Continent tutorial and RobA's regional map tutorial - and a lot of experimentation.

I'm pretty jazzed with the results. I know it's small, but my PC @ home is very old so I could'nt do anything bigger and still have any quality to the details.

About the only thing left to do is add the cities and various labels, scale, etc.

As always can critiques, comments, etc. are welcome.

Looks pretty good, I'm diggin it.

Yes, FAB. So what kind of topology is giving rise to the desert at bottom, ice at top then ? (Not that it really matters anyway...)

Thx for the responses guys...

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Originally Posted by Redrobes

Yes, FAB. So what kind of topology is giving rise to the desert at bottom, ice at top then ? (Not that it really matters anyway...)

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I guess I really never really thought about Topology all that much. Though I kind of had North-Central America in mind with the climate spread. I wanted to see if I could get a "good looking" tundra/arctic area as well as the arid/desert region as I hadn't really tried to do that before.

There will be another continent that will be placed 'below' this one and the climate will be reversed arid/desert to tundra/permafrost/arctic.

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Originally Posted by Steel General

Thx for the responses guys...



I guess I really never really thought about Topology all that much. Though I kind of had North-Central America in mind with the climate spread. I wanted to see if I could get a "good looking" tundra/arctic area as well as the arid/desert region as I hadn't really tried to do that before.

There will be another continent that will be placed 'below' this one and the climate will be reversed arid/desert to tundra/permafrost/arctic.

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I think the thing he was thinking about was that generally, deserts form via lack of water, mostly due to rains being dropped in the mountains before passing over. In most cases, deserts form on the leeward side of mountain range.

Joe

OK, that makes sense.

I suppose I could go back and make it a little less "desert-y". Mix some kind of green color in stead of the yellow-tan and make it more of a low-moisture steppe/plain area.

I'll give that a try and see how it looks.

There is also a high pressure zone around 30 degrees north and south latitude that leads to reduced rainfall. Gives me a pretty good sense of scale that...

OK, I've got this about wrapped up. I went back and added some green to the arid areas so that they don't appear so stark, and I also added a little to the "tundra" in the north, to help break it up a bit.

I've uploaded 2 versions; 1 with cities, etc. 1 without.

About the only thing left to do is add a scale bar, and maybe add some political borders. I also thought I might tweak the oceans abit, maybe redo the texture.

I haven't quite worked out what I want the scale to be. So I'm open to suggestions for that.

FYI...for those of you interested the Large text font is Papyrus, the city label font is Segoe UI Bold Italic, the compass rose is actually a font too, Fantasy Clipart.

The plains start very abruptly... There needs to be some sort of transition between the two. Also, the ground to be in a radically different style compared to the rest of the land. Perhaps try to make it more... eh... I dunno, i just doesn't feel right to me.

Other then that, very nicely done. I love how the ice caps look... Although I like the icecaps of the first version better. It might be less realistic, but the first one looks a lot nicer (IMO).

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Originally Posted by A. Smith

The plains start very abruptly... There needs to be some sort of transition between the two. Also, the ground to be in a radically different style compared to the rest of the land. Perhaps try to make it more... eh... I dunno, i just doesn't feel right to me.

Other then that, very nicely done. I love how the ice caps look... Although I like the icecaps of the first version better. It might be less realistic, but the first one looks a lot nicer (IMO).

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Thx for the feedback.

I see what you mean about the plains, that shouldn't be to hard to fix. A gradient and some air-brushing should take care of it

I'm still kinda on the fence with the tundra/ice cap area, I felt the first version was a little overboard so I broke it up some.