What do I need?

[Ralok]

dude the map you made is rpetty much perfect for the era I am working with. I need to figure it out environmentally though. Deserts, forests, plains . . .

[DrunkenEwok]

Glad you like it! I still have a few reservations, but you're welcome to take it as-is and run with it.

If you'd rather, however, I'd be happy to do some more fiddling - maybe rough in some rivers (add some erosion effects via Wilbur?), fix the contrast (the northern ocean is awfully dark, and Olympus Mons is just SO high it blows out the contrast), correct the edge mistakes I made on the northern cap and the NE island. And if you can give me some hints on where you want deserts, forests, and plains (say a copy of the map with color-coded blotches?) I can take a shot at putting in some more detail.

[Ralok]

my skills in mapping are not suited to doing what I need to do, so if you could help finish this up that would be great.

this is a partly colored version of the map that gives a vague idea of the environment, black plants are larger plants trees, bushes, shrubs, swamp-land. Yellow is smaller plants . . . plains, marshland . . . red is desert

It isnt very good - _ - and the placement makes no sense. But then again this whole map makes no sense as at the time the ancient martians did not have satellites . . . but if I really wanted a LOTR style map that owuld mean re-crawing the whole thing and making careful note of the geological features . . . of an entire planet.

http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p...-mars-gimp.png

[DrunkenEwok]

Here's a second attempt.

I did some erosion work and masking in Wilbur, followed by composition in Gimp. As requested, I made black trees/swamps in the lowlands, with some yellow plants sprinkled in, and more of the latter in the midlands. The high deserts are made of reds and browns, and we've got some basic arctic caps. I've also got some rivers and clouds included - though both can be easily masked out if you'd rather not have them.

I can't really think of anything else I'd do to it at this point, but I'm happy to take suggestions, or I can just post the xcf (gimp) file somewhere and you can make the little changes yourself.

Actually - here's the link: Mars Map XCF. The most likely changes I can see you making are toggling the Clouds/Rivers layers, and maybe painting on the Land Colors. The former is fairly straightforward, but to make changes to the latter, I recommend just painting on the layer masks (the mostly black images to the right) - painting white will add more of the specified color, and painting black will remove it. You can also play with the opacity/blend modes, or try running a Hue/Saturation filter on the actual layer if you don't like my choice of colors.

Feel free to post more if you have questions.

[Ralok]

Thank you so much :d

[Ralok]

I only have one complaint with this map . . . is the lack of grasslands . . . I love deserts and all that . . . but replacing some of that desert area with grassland would be nice . . . I think I will try although I know I will fail x _ x