Thread: [WIP] Cora

Jezelf's tutorials are amazing. Thanks for reminding me, I've put the link in the quickstart sticky.

The clouds filter renders at a fixed size regardless of the size of your map, so if you have a small document you will have relatively 'big' mountains and vice versa. The only way to adjust this is to render the clouds in another bigger or smaller document and then upscale or downscale it when you paste it into your original document.

If you want the mountains less 'bumpy' select your heightmap in the channels tab and use a brightness and contrast adjustment to clip away the extreme blacks and whites which translate into peaks and troughs when you render the lighting effects or when you render the lighting effects push the slider at the bottom more towards flat or lower the intensity of the lighting.

My niece has Communion today so I'll be gone most of the day but when I get back I'll give his tut a look-through and give ya some pointers by this evening. In my experience, no matter the size of the clouds, the Lighting Effects filter seems to render "mountains" at one size fits all. Anyways, I'll check back this evening.

First off, these look like pretty realistic (but blurry) hills. Second, if you want to get rid of some of them (to have more flat spots) just use a soft-tip eraser, turn down the opacity of the eraser to under 20% and erase out the areas that you want to be flatter...note that this will only work if the hills are on their own layer. If everything has been flattened/merged together then you will have to use the eyedropper tool to select a good green color and then airbrush over the tops of the hills you want to be flatter. You could also go back to the gray-scale layer and airbrush over some areas before running the lighting effects filter.

As for good colors, well...that's all in the eye of the beholder. RobA has a post here:

Gradient Goodness

which links to a site that has tons of cool gradients that might help inspire you.

Hey thanks Ascension. been playing around with some other color schemes and such and came up with this one:

Yep, that's a great lookin color scheme. Lots of little gradations there that really work well together.

was playing around with brushes like Jeremy's tutorial suggests for doing the mountains, but after looking up a bunch of the old maps of Middle Earth I decided to hand draw in the mountains myself. This is the effect that I'm getting and I'm really starting to like it.

Played around with the size of the mountains and decided that the map was turning out a bit too dark, I want more of that orange parchment color so I changed a few things around. So far the mountains seem to be coming in pretty good, in the end I may put on another blended layer for more shadow on the mountains, right now they are just one color though

I'm liking the style Sleaker. I liked the darker version better though.

After much headache with monitor calibration and figuring out which of my monitors was setup properly, I've adjusted the main map colors slightly kind of a reddish brown which seemed to be the most popular. After that I started adding in a bit of grey shading on the mountain line as a go along to give it a more pencil feel.
This is how the mountains should look when it's finished, at actual size.