Thread: WIP - Lischau

Pretty nice...the only real problems I see with the rivers is that at times it appears they go up hill.

Couple of things regarding 'river rules'; (1) they usually take the path of least resistance and (2) converge as the approach the sea/ocean/lake.

Keep those in mind and you should be OK most of the time.

As I said (or at least tried to say, English isn't my first language), unfortunately I can't do anything about the river-placement, since I have to adhere to existing material - even if this means that one river splits, most run straight through the mountainrange instead of flowing into the nearest sea.

In the new heightmaps for the mountains I try to avoid any running uphill, at the moment I'm waiting for some information concerning specific mountains

OK, sorry - I completely missed your comments regarding the rivers.

Well, I could comment, but you seem to have the things I'd suggest on your to-do list already But yeah... the diagonal strikes texture is just a bit too visible, I think, especially on the forests.

Love to see more

I have (more or less) finished the elevations of the mountains, now I have to make the transition between the individual heights more smooth.

at the moment I apply a average blur and get some structure back with the smudge (?) tool.

Does anybody know a trick to make a gradient as an interpolation of the layers? Just applying a strong blurr gets rid of all details in the heightmap, so I have to do it all by hand.

Hope I you understand my question, thanks

Craith

Update:

I tweaked some textures / icons and finished the heightmaps für the mountains. I'm not yet satisfied with the textures/colors, but I think it's getting better.

Added roads, those are only temporary and will change somewhere in the future

Real Life is catching up on me and I hardly get any work done on the map, should get better in a few weeks (hopefully)

Again, please comment / critique / guide me on my quest to improve this map.

First, I really like the colors on this map. Also, I think the forests and the water look very nice. Good work with the tutorials, and very good first map. Consider yourself repped.

I do have to say that I liked the first version of the mountains better, but in both maps they were not my favs. In both, I might like a more gradual fade between the mountains and the grass... right now its a little abrupt. In the new one, the tops look like they were shorn off. Did you use the emboss tool or did you do these differently?

Also, the border on the upper left are (in green) is really hard to see. Maybe change it to white, orange, or purple?

Thank you very much for your feedback!

For the mountains I used a crude handdrawn map with the most important mountains, then I created heigthlines using those information, and finally I used the smudge tool and some blurr to smooth it out and create ridges.

I think I will have to experiment a bit with the bumpiness and sharpen the peaks.

Concerning the fade between mountains and grass, you gave me the idea to add some hills around it (would also be logical) I'll see when I get to it, thank you very much!

The border colors are chosen because of the individual flag-colors of the countries, but I guess I should just chose some that look good. The top-left country uses grey and green in its banner.

The colors on the map are 90% from RobA's great Gimp Tutorial, so I cant take credit here

The map is pretty overall; I like the forest texture and I actually like the soft mountains.

You seem to have a river running uphill in the northeast corner of the continent though.

Edit: I missed a couple of posts earlier; you've already explained inability to change river placement.