Thread: Andalor (Satellite-Style)

Some observations:
* The mountains on the snowy parts do not look as good as elsewhere. There's a slight sensation of them floating above the land, probably caused by the way they poke out of that flat whiteness.
* All mountains seem to be lacking snow caps.
* The dark coastlining appears a bit sharp now. Could use some softening.
* Sunlight seems to be coming from the NE. This is a bit odd for the nothernmost parts of the map, since it gives the appearance that the sun is nearer the pole than the equator.

Hi Rongar. I like the colors of your land and mountains. I noticed some of the same issues Ghostman already talked about, but perhaps you haven't gotten as far as the snow-caps section of Gidde's tutorial yet (step 17). Regarding the northern section of the land mass, the arctic area is completely devoid of the land texture present throughout the rest of your map. If you're using the gradient from the tutorial, then the problem might just be that you haven't to adjust the color curves yet (see step 8 of Gidde's tutorial). You might also want to adjust the color of your more arctic alps from brown to blue gray, so that they fit in with the terrain better (see step 16.f.). Also, the sea texture looks a bit unnatural; it almost looks like your land is on the same layer as your sea, so that when you applied the bump map to the land, it affected the sea as well. You might want to think about applying a layer mask to the land layer that blocks out the sea, and creating the sea on a completely separate layer. Ok, those comments aside, I think that this map has potential. Like I said earlier, I like the colors and textures of the map, and the continent looks good over all. Looking forward to watching it progress.

Cheers,

-Arsheesh

Thanks mates! I'll try to work out those issues.

@Arsheesh: Right, I haven't followed the tutorial step by step. I've left out some steps and continued with the next ones, because I was either a) too dumb to get a result comparable to those from the tut, or b) not quite satified with the results from the tut. Be assured though that I will catch up on them before I call this map done.

Thanks once again.


Regards,

~~Rongar

looks pretty good. I would play around with the colors a bit. one thing i've noticed with those tutorials is that they are very popular and ppl are using those colors to the letter. That means that there are alot of very many simiilar looking maps out there. try changing the shades a bit. May make it stand out a bit more. Just a thought. Those colors do look really good tho!

Marc

Thanks pal!

You made a good point there so I've changed the colors to some extend. I hope you'll like it, since I actually do.

Other things I've changed:

-added snowcaps
-changed ocean texture (and color)
-added nation borders (most likely going to reduce opacity a bit)

Things I'm going to do next:

-finally correcting the northern parts (already tried to, but I think I'll have to import the layer with the land color gradient from an earier version of the map)
-implementing lakes and rivers
-trying to correct the lighting issues
-do the labelling

So, here's the current version. Thanks a lot for your support so far!

Okay, I think I've worked out the issues with the northern parts of the continent. Probably going to do some finetuning later on, but I believe it's doing alright for now. What do you think?

I like the darker version and especially the ocean. Keep on!

Great work, Thumbs up on the colour scheme m8.

Thanks guys!

A small update.

-added a bunch of rivers&lakes (on trial)
-added a few labels (also on trial)
-re-did the snowcaps (hopefully for the better)
-another minor color fix
-screwed up the northern parts :-/

Things to come up next:

-fixing the northern parts again
-more river&lakes
-more labels
-a fancy border/frame
-a scale
-a compass
-a grid (perhaps)
-a key (perhaps)


(Quality needed to be reduced to 86% in order to fit with the maximum file size)