Argontath - Work in Progress

[Valtharius]

Greetings again!

About a week after I posted my "Hello" message (see link below) my computer's motherboard decided it was better to NOT have working capacitors and much easier to stay cooler if it wasn't running. *smirk* Completely un-salvageable, except for a few parts. Oh well, I patched together a garbage computer out of 8 year old parts and finally got CC3 to run... and that is about it. LOL

Concept and Hand Drawn Maps of Argontath

I took the advice of several people to keep the hand drawn maps continental look, with a few changes. Added a few new continents for further storyline and pieced it together in Paintshop Pro 5 (yes, 5. It won't run anything else heheheh) after screen capturing each continent.

I'm going to slowly add mountain ranges and rivers, then place political borders down. This is a work in progress... much more progress to come in the next few months. Please, I welcome comments, criticism, advice and nagging... well, maybe not nagging.

Cheers!

~Valtharius the Mad

[Ghostman]

That's some bad luck with the PC. Your world map looks good, save for the repetitive land texture. That should become less of a problem onse you add different terrain features though. The coastlines for the polar landmasses (or are they just ice sheets?) look awesome. Maybe you could use similar detail for the continents? Oh, and that there is the most badass compass rose I've seen to date!

[Valtharius]

Thanks Ghostman for the comments! I drew up that compass about 20 years ago and scanned it in. Funny the things you find in old piles of gaming papers.

I produced a grey scale image of the land masses and drew in a rough draft of proposed mountain ranges. Once I get these laid down in CC3, it will be on to river flows... uggh. God may have made the world in 6 days, but it is going to take me a LOT longer. heheheh

~Valtharius the Mad

[Valtharius]

Revised the mountains and added a few more ranges. Placed major lakes, rivers and the desert/wasteland areas. Rough sketch is coming along.

[Volsung]

Looking forward to more!

Also, have you read the info about posting images on the forums?

http://forums.cartographersguild.com...ead.php?t=3174

You don't need to use an outside image host and the pics look bigger.

[Valtharius]

A HUGE, HUGE thank you to Ascension for his Photoshop tutorial! This is my first attempt at using Photoshop. Almost all my maps are hand drawn or were created using the old JASCO Paint Shop Pro. (http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...28and-old%29-D)

I finally picked up a laptop that will run everything I need it to run. I've been playing with Ascension's Photoshop tutorial for the last few days... I've gotten up to the point where the rivers will be placed. Mind you, the polar caps are far north and south of this continent so they are unseen. Anyway, here is my work so far...



I'd love some feedback! Feel free to roast me over a spit!

~Val

[Ascension]

Looks just like I did it myself, nice job.

[hohum]

It is very good, the only thing I noticed is that the continental shelf doesn't match the land in a few places. A few islands seem to be floating off the edge of shelves and there are a couple of places where troughs seem to undercut the land. But everything else is spot on.

[Valtharius]

Looks just like I did it myself, nice job.

Thanks Ascension! That is a huge compliment coming from you! I made a mistake though... I didn't use a 300 point airbrush with 10% flow... I ended up having a hard pixeled edge to the land masses. I took the eastern land mass of an old map and scaled it to 2000x2000 in Paint Shop Pro and copied the image into a PS layer and then traced around it at 400% magnification. Took me a while to figure out how to do mountains and that challenge will continue as I try and figure out how to create more mountains to 'create' a range where I want them. I still have the black and white cut-out of my land mass and am contemplating putting it into Paint Shop Pro 5 to soften the edges of the continent then transferring it back as a layer into PS and experimenting with settings.

Two questions for you, if you have time... is a 2000x2000 map just one continent, or an entire world? And lastly, if I want to 'blow-up' an area of the world to make a close up map, how do I go about making sure that mountains, hills and rivers are consistent with the world map?

Again, you have done an absolutely wonderful job with this tutorial!!! Thank you again!!!

It is very good, the only thing I noticed is that the continental shelf doesn't match the land in a few places. A few islands seem to be floating off the edge of shelves and there are a couple of places where troughs seem to undercut the land. But everything else is spot on.

Meh... my islands are falling off the world. lol I'm looking through that step right now trying to figure out how to 'ring' the continent and islands so it doesn't happen again. I'm having most of my fun playing with the color palette in order to create temperate lands and plains areas. In the world there are a few magically created wastelands from magic gone bad. I am untalented (I just suck) when it comes to painting things... I screwed up models ships badly as a youngster by painting them solid red with the old Testers Model Paint sets and it scarred me for good. heheheh.

~Val

[Ascension]

2000 is enough, technically - I could squeeze an entire world into 100 pixels - but I almost always start at 4000 for a continent. More pixels = more detail and I'm obsessive about detail. Fewer pixels = larger scale. The answer is up to you really, how much detail do you want. Blowing things up to do a zoomed in regional map is hard to do because you're wanting to add detail that wasn't there in the first place. PS can take a layer and enlarge it without too many distortions but if you go too big you'll want to run some blur on it to smooth out the blockiness, maybe also some noise to put some bumps into it. Normally I just redo a zoomed in map from start because I can deal with those headaches while the resizing stuff makes my head hurt and trying to fix things takes too long. Of course you also need different settings and techniques for that so maybe I need to do a tut on satellite mapping at regional scale.