WIP- My Homebrew Setting Map

[Karro]

actually that's how I've been doin' the bump maps. I've been following the tutorial on here (however like the man says this isn't for World sized maps) so That's probably why it doesn't look as good as it "could be". Right now I've got all the layers merged per terrain type (ocean, rivers & lakes, hills, land, mountains, etc). I've been trying to blend the hill and land terrain, together. I may "blur" the land to lessen the texturing and spread it out more.

I noticed when I went through the tutorial that it didn't produce mountains quite like I was exspecting, either--they didn't have quite the effect I wanted.

So I played around and came up with a composite approach that gets more nearly to what I want (and which I'll be using on the world map I'm working on to.

I started with RobA's other mountain tutorial Here, which I combined with RobA's regional map tutorial to produce results in this map.

Then I built on that with some ideas presented by jfrazierjr in this thread (which I believe he was also developing for use on a world-scale map), and my process matured into the products shown here.

I wonder if I should get around to writing a tutorial on how I arrived at a version I actually liked... I suppose it would be helpful to myself just to have my process detailed in a step-by-step fashion.

Another point of advice: I never merge layers until I'm absolutely sure that I won't need the separated layers again.

And even then, I save it down as a new version of the file so that I can always go back to the older version if I decide I want to make changes later.

It's saved my bacon several times as I have decided to go back and change things (like in my world map thread where I had to go back and redo all my islands... I had a based black-and-white layer I could work on that formed the basis of the land and ocean masks).