Reply With QuoteDid a spherize on the hemispheres (not technically ideal, but it's what I got), and added some sea texturing in there.
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December Challenge: The World of Deis Mundi
My entry is going to represent colonial empires on a world in a similar time frame to our late 17th/early 18th centuries. Obviously, in our world, maps didn't get accurate until much, much later, and there's nothing to say this on is right on the money either, but it's accurate to the best of the artist's knowledge.
Stage one was working out some hemispheres:
***Latest WIP***
Did a spherize on the hemispheres (not technically ideal, but it's what I got
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I like it!
A little more work. I decided to add in some inset maps of a couple regions. The size is already getting huge, even compressed...
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I wasn't happy with the continent shapes I had in the first version, so I started over.
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Those are fantastic and pretty realistic continent shapes! How did you make them?
Great start, I can't wait to see this map progress.
Thanks!
As for the continents, it was fairly easy. I started with my hemispheres, which are just two solid black circles side by side on their own layer. Then I used Ascension's technique of generating landmasses, which is:
-Set up a new layer, Filter-->Clouds
-New layer, Edit-->Fill-->50% gray
-on the clouds layer, just draw in whatever shapes you want, using a round hard brush of various sizes
(I had the hemispheres layer clicked as a selection so I could make sure I didn't have any 'overlap' of landmasses off the sides of the hemisphere)
-Once I had the landmasses how I wanted, I merged the Cloud layer and the 50% gray layer (the one I'd been using the brush on)
Then, with the hemispheres layer still chosen as a selection, Modify-->Inverse, Delete. This removes everything outside of the hemispheres. This new merged layer is renamed 'Base'.
Next, I saved a PNG copy. This is because, on the inset maps, I didn't want them to show any distortion...
...which comes from using the Filter-->Distort-->Spherize function on each hemisphere. I have an additional layer, which is just one half of the two hemispheres - one black circle, in other words. This was important because if you try to spherize based on selecting the hemispheres layer, you get illogical resutlts. Try it and see.
So, I clicked on the Base layer, and loaded that single circle layer as a selection (first moving the circle layer so it lines up with one of the hemisphere halves). Then Spherize. Then repeat on the other hemisphere. This creates pretty convincing landmasses, distorted so they appear to be halves of a globe. One thing I discovered is that you don't want land too near the edge of the hemisphere halves when you're drawing in your continents, because anything too near the edge will be either chopped off or too distorted to use when you Spherize.
For the inset maps, I opened my B&W PNG map in Paint, chose the area I wanted to expand, and blew it up by 300%, then imported back to PS to use as a template. Then I used the Pencil tool with a 1px head to draw in the inset maps, using those imported PNGs as guidelines.
Whew! That was kind of long-winded.
And some more progress. I've discovered that, even as big as this thing is (5000x3000!) I'm still not going to be able to squeeze as much detail in as I wanted to.
And a little more done tonight before I go to sleep; started adding in the colors representing the colonial empires.
What a fine entry! Great!
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