Continent WIP

[Tear]

I was thinking about server space.

I'm no moderator or anything, I was just talking from a learner's point of view.
Soon enough, a moderator will show up and tell me if my suggestion was over the top, but they are really friendly here so don't worry.

Until then, post away.

[Gidde]

Well, you were right I think, so hopefully it won't take up too much space

I tried to get rid of enough of those tiny little islands that it didn't look messy, but keep enough to keep the coastline's character. Hopefully I struck a good balance.

[Gandwarf]

Server space doesn't seem to be an issue at the moment. We will let you know if or when it has become an issue
Until then, feel free to post several WIP versions in a thread. As Tear said that's a good way for everyone to monitor progression and maybe learn some new things. Also threads tend to make less sense if there's only one image... comments get outdated, etc.
Just don't overdo it (work five minutes on a map and post a new WIP every time).

Anyway, you made some great improvements. Forests look more than convincing enough for me now. The texture for the ocean is great.
The mountains look good, but they do seem a bit thin. You might want to thicken some parts to break the uniform look.

[Ascension]

I was worried about that once upon a time as well...taking up too much server space. But Arcana assures us that we are nowhere close to maxing out. If we ever get there we'll probably just retire some old stuff to the archives.

[Gidde]

Added a border, compass rose and scalebar, and now I think I'm stuck until I come up with a way to show cities and roads. Nothing I've tried looks right

[Gidde]

Resurrecting this one since it won't leave me alone. I think I'm actually going to use this continent for the novel I started all this for in the first place.

It needed some tweaks though, some of the climate wasn't right, and I wanted to tilt the whole thing a bit. Plus I'd learned a lot in the meantime, so here's the new version after completely starting over.

What I'm having trouble with are scale issues. I've roughed in the forest with some dark green blobs; I'm not sure whether I should go with a slight texture, or full blown forests like in the middle earth map (which was at about 4x the scale). The latitude and longitude lines are 5' each, which makes this about 2mi/px.

Any thoughts on which would be better at this scale?

[Ramah]

Your mountains look a lot better on this new version.

May I ask though, why are using this method when you went to all the trouble of converting Ascension's tutorial with amazing results? I would have thought that using that method would reduce your forest scale issues too.

[Gidde]

Thanks, Ramah

Actually I tried. That's why it took so long to get something postable; I've been working on this since I finished the translation. I ran into bunches of problems, though, partly because I'm remaking a continent that doesn't fit (it extends past the desert latitudes into jungle), partly because that method works best on a continent without predetermined mountain ranges, and partly because I increased the size to a point where gimp's clouds (which have a hard limit on detail size) don't produce the same effects. So this ended up being an attempt at working some of the concepts I learned from translating that one into the style I've been developing.

Edit: I suppose while I still have the PS trial on my machine that I used to do the translation, I could give it a go using PS for the parts that gimp's making difficult for this continent. I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

[rdanhenry]

Your forests seem to have a strange phobia of mountains and coastal regions. Looking at an earlier version, they did go up to the mountains in places, but had the same avoidance of the sea. What is the reason for this?

[Gidde]

In this particular case, it's because it's only the rough base shading layer that's there. The actual forests go on top of it and are better incorporated with the mountains. For the coast, it's just aesthetic.