Thread: New Dawn of the West Satellite View

If I was a machine I wouldn't pass out from hunger or lack of sleep at least once per 48 hour period...


Sleep is for the weak! I'll sleep when I'm dead, I have better things to do than miss out on 1/3 of my life!!

(and ugh, I forgot to fix the water..)

Text layer added, a few things adjusted due to the difference spacings in fonts, and a few small style changes. Pretty much the same as the old map in terms of terrain, now to tweak it

And I know about the border, i'm not happy with it right now, much work will be involved to make it look good.

Water is better, but not finalized, I'm considering have some deep sea terrain faintly visible off the coast..

By and large, I like this: it looks great overall.

A few points of criticism:

In the corners of the borders in the SE, there's a nice-fancy looking corner device. In all the other corners, this device is covered-up and cut-off and it doesn't look so great in those instances. Either keep all four corner devices on top, or get rid of this border design entirely.

The smoke from the volcano appears to be photoshopped on from an actual aerial photo of smoke (i.e. it gives the impression of not being original art). If it is, in fact, original art, my apologies, but the way it spreads over the border on the right definitely makes it look cut-out from another photo elsewhere. Maybe try whatever technique Pasis used on his recent volcanic island map (if that's duplicable).

Anyway, other than those two issues, this map looks pretty dang great and rep-worthy.

I wasn't too concerned about the borders when posting this one, I have a flattened out version of the terrain that included the border, and after having done the text I was starting to work on the water layer. I didn't feel like going through the work of erasing all the corners to let the border show through, or to copy everything back into the primary working file as in the final version the borders will be on top of everything (and different from what shows in here anyhow).

Thanks for the comments on the volcano smoke, it is indeed copied from another pic at this point in time. I figured it would make an excellent place holder as it is very close to the final shape, direction, shading and overall effect I will be after.

Originally Posted by Coyotemax

I wasn't too concerned about the borders when posting this one, I have a flattened out version of the terrain that included the border, and after having done the text I was starting to work on the water layer. I didn't feel like going through the work of erasing all the corners to let the border show through, or to copy everything back into the primary working file as in the final version the borders will be on top of everything (and different from what shows in here anyhow).

Thanks for the comments on the volcano smoke, it is indeed copied from another pic at this point in time. I figured it would make an excellent place holder as it is very close to the final shape, direction, shading and overall effect I will be after.

Cool. Carry on, then.

Still not finihsed with the water layer, I'm going to wait until i get past my photoshop issues before I work on it much more.

The ground texture is mostly done, peeding a few placement adjustments proposed by AslanC.


Text layer has had some minor adjustments, and the border is done. Any major changes (place names reverting to original language, wording changes, additional markers) after this will wait until I have a completely stable version of PS that has the features I require (in negotiations to trade in my cs4 for cs3 right now - i need to keep my layers, multiple layer selections and warped text paths!)



So to tide us all over till then, woot.

My jaw and the floor are having a meeting right now! WOW!

Um... the Ravenwood looks weird as heck from the air Maybe it should just look like a dark green forest me thinks, since it isn't really a scarred place, just full of monsters and whatnot.

The Bloodwood could survive half that size.

And Ushak should be browner

Everything else seems okay... I love! L-O-V-E what you did with the Iron Coast and the Bone Steppes! Nice job and those tree convered mountains in Caralon? Pure gold!

Any chance we could get some glacial action at the top of the world?

And is that a continental shelf? Neat.

Spectacular work dude. I love the forest pattern/filter/whatever you did and the cracked desert is way cool. Er hot, bah, you know.

Aslan: added to my working notes.

It's the start of a continental shelf, yes, I'm going to work in some of the ideas from my R'lyeh experiment, I think. Plus make the seas look deeper.

Going by the previous maps, I figured the ravenwood was kind of a dead forest area, so I kind of went with that idea. I can add some more greenish tinge to it, no prob


I'd say right about now I'm walking a path between styles, mixing and matching between stuff I've been picking out of the tutorials The forest texture is a mix of the one straight out of the pasis tutorial and a few other ground cover textures, with a fair amount of layerwork overtop to get some of the areas a different feel.
The desert wasteland is from a dried mud texture, then I played with that till I was happy, I was originally going to tone downt he crack effect (holycrap, you can see those fissures from orbit??) and then i figured that would actually add to the atmosphere.. imagine an entire desert that was made up of the grand canyon and epic scale fissures.. - kind of fits with the way the place has been built up in my mind

It's taking time, but I'm starting to develop an individual style for these

I've probably spent more work on the border than it needs (do we really need a border afterall?) but knotwork has been my specialty for almost 20 years and it's nice to be working with it again Kind of like meeting up with an old friend and going for coffee, heh.