Reply With QuoteI found a tutorial hidden on shadedrelief.com. I had been to the site many times before I found it. Here is the direct link.Originally Posted by Steel General
http://www.shadedrelief.com/retro/index.html
The first thing that jumps out at me is the artifacts from jpeg compression. I'll bet if you save it out again with a quality level of 80 - 90% it will look much nicer. I'm guessing this one is around 50 - 60%? Jpeg doesn't like areas of flat color very much, which is interfering with the clarity of your coastlines.
I don't know how you're approaching your shaded relief, but if you're doing it with the overlay and dodge/burn trick, put your relief layer above the trees--that way the trees will appear to be on the slopes also.
Beyond that, I agree with Ravs: some variation in the sea would be very nice. Make it subtle, though--you don't want the water texture to overpower the details of your land.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
I found a tutorial hidden on shadedrelief.com. I had been to the site many times before I found it. Here is the direct link.
http://www.shadedrelief.com/retro/index.html
oops.I didn't even look at that. Never fear, the uncompressed full-rez file runs about 107MB.
Very good site. I just skimmed the article, so I apologize if what I am about to say was already covered there. Torstan suggested an improvement to this technique some time back--create a layer and fill it with a medium gray: 127, 127, 127 in RGB. Put that layer above all of your terrain layers and set its blending mode to Overlay. The new layer should vanish--all of the gray pixels are now transparent. Do shaded relief manipulations on this new layer, and they'll affect all the layers below them but they will not actually change any of the other layers. Your shaded relief will be completely non-destructive, and if you decide to add new features later on, they'll automatically receive the relief treatment without you having to do any difficult matching later on.
For an example of how this looks under the trees, take a look at this image:
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
This is very nice. I especially like the trees and the rolling hills.
There are a couple of points along the coasts and rivers that have some pretty straight lines, or sharp angles, which do not look quite natural, but I like the trees a lot.
What is the scale that you are looking to do? It looks like a pretty small area based upon the trees.
I've used your trees in my project, check it out and see what you think
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3782
This is a small area of a bigger map. I haven't put a scale too it, but I think this map is roughly 3500ft square. I plan for at least 256 more tiles, so the finished area would be about 10 x 10 miles (If I survive to see it finished - the task is looking larger and larger). I want enough room for 1000 players to live and explore, so I might have to make it larger.
Nice job!
Looks pretty good, I like that water.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
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