Yet Another Middle Earth

[Gidde]

Time for another update. I couldn't resist tweaking the mountains ... I think they're final now, and the forests are all done (maybe). I'm torn between dotting the countryside with random bits of forest for more realism, and keeping it to ONLY what forests are on the many maps I'm working from (as it is now). I may hit a compromise and add in forests that are mentioned in the books but not on the maps.

Next up: roads, towns, towers, etc. ... and swamps. No idea how I'm going to handle the swamps

This is at ~60% resolution (the highest I could post), after the shrinkage necessitated by my so-far-disappointing vista experience.

[su_liam]

You know, the only thing that I can think whenever I look at any map of Middle Earth is that given the way Mordor looks there's no way anyone could think Tolkien was a geologist instead of a linguist.

To be fair, at the time continental drift was considered a lunatic fringe idea. Long, thin land bridges leading from India to South America, or lost continents sunken into the ocean? Sure. Continents moving from place to place like giant stone rafts? Whatever...(ya lunatic)...

LOTR was finished by about 1946, the first serious support for the theory of continental drift wasn't until ten years later. Had he been a geologist of the time, he might have created something really off-the-wall.

[Gregorus Prime]

It was mostly considered a lunatic fringe idea because it was first theorized by a meteorologist.

For the map: I'd recommend putting some more noise on those forests, since they look kinda plastic right now. Mountains are kinda fuzzy, too. I've found that making a simplified height-defining bump map on top of the texture bump map on the mountains really gives them great definition. The rivers look great, though.

[Steel General]

It's definitely coming along nicely.

I agree with Gregorus Prime though, the forests do still look a bit 'plastic'. Also you may want to consider a bit more color in the mountains.

[Gidde]

Thanks for the kind words and suggestions

I added some saturation to the mountains and (hopefully) de-plasticked the forests. I cropped the merry hell out of this one to get closer to actual resolution, but it's still a little lower-res than the actual.

I'm not doing anything about the fuzziness of the mountains yet, because I still need to detail the base land texture, and I don't want to mess with the land-mountain interface until I have the land all set.

Does this look better, guys?

[Ascension]

I like it. Now, the last thing to add to your forests is color variation with brown and green clouds and mess with the blend mode of the color adjust layer if you want.

[Gidde]

Thanks!

Had to translate that to the gimp, so I'm not sure if this is exactly what you had in mind. Like this?

[Ascension]

Not too shabby. I might add some more brown spots but I didn't realize you were in gimp. But like I said, not too shabby.

[Steel General]

More good progress

[Gidde]

I tried upping the saturation on the color adjustment layer for the forests, hopefully they have closer to the right amount of brown now.

Then I realized that the same thing was wrong with the base land, so I did the same thing to a lesser extent to the entire landform, and got the base colors down for barrens and swamps. Mordor still needs a lot of work, but thankfully I now have a really cool before and after volcano map to look at for inspiration

Edit: I'm adding a full-res piece (Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain), because most of the color work I just did went bye-bye when I shrank the map to fit under the size limit.