World of Ehhhhmm (my first map ever)

[plaindog]

Ok lo and behold. After finishing that Chucks photoshop guide which is excellent, I decided to publish my work here. Voila! 2 hours work in photoshop. Im satisfied and now hooked on making maps. I desperately need some maps for my Shadow World, Jaiman campaign, and what better way is there really? Guess I'm going to create a lot of local maps of Jaiman in the future

mortenmap.png

[Chashio]

What! No 'Castle Aaaahhg' ?! (kidding) That is a beautiful first map, though, um... the breaks in your ocean outline around the island areas seem accidental, like you forgot to connect them. Could be just me, though. I look forward to seeing more of your work!

[jbgibson]

Chashio's right - it looks really nice, especially for a first. In my book a map right in your first post is worth a bit of rep - thanks for jumping right in.

You've got a sea-to-sea river there in the north - that won't work. Water has to flow downhill. If that admittedly terse rule doesn't clear it up, take a look at the Most Excellent tutorial on How To Get Your Rivers In The Right Place. The little river at the far NE is odd - I wouldn't expect it to skim so close to those little bays without ending there - try just rotating it more onshore and see if it looks better.

The combination of extremely crinkly mountain bits with the almost sketch-painted wider expanses of mountains seems odd. I guess it's an amount-of-detail thing - I would expect the level of detail to be pretty consistent across all your elements. The forest texture too - it has shadows within the texture itself, and the mountains have shadows - one expects each expanse of forest to be a 3-D view, with maybe a bit of shadow rimming their SE, instead of being gently faded into the neighboring terrain.

I actually like the interrupted vivid surf-line; don't know why :-). Is it an artifact of how you generated it, or is it on purpose?

Does Jaiman already exist, as even general land outlines, or are you going to let its shapes be whatever you generate as maps? What's the scale of this bit, by the way? The symbol scale seems to say "island" more than "continent", but you could settle that with a scale bar.

Nice work - keep at it!

[plaindog]

Thank you very much for the feedback. To be honest, this was a rushed map I did when I got bored from work. I didn't really concentrate too much on the details like rivers, flow of the land and such. It was not so important since I wasn't going to use this map for anything. I primarly just wanted to go through the tutorial and see how complicated the process was.

Chashio: haha I plan to add that castle later I decided to fix the breaks around the islands because they intertwined alot in the narrow parts between the main island and the small ones. It looked weird so I removed some.

jbgibson: Some good feedback from you, thanks a bunch. Good tip on the tutorial. I will look into it later when I start to do some mapping in Jaiman. Jaiman is a continent in Kulthea, the gaming world created for Rolemaster. The surf line was broken on purpose because of some trouble with the lines. The forests are horrible Not sure on the scale of this thing yet hehe.

World map
kulthea.jpg

Map of Jaiman
jaiman.jpg