Looks very nice. I'll have to try the tutorial you used, it seems I passed over it too lightly.
Wow, these are fun!
I'm sure the style on this one will be recognizeable, I've started going through some tutorials on here. I have to say, this one was nicely written, very easy to follow, and the best part - explained WHY the steps were being followed.
So, this one is based on an actual game from another site I'm a member of, and over the last 8 years or so we've never actually made a map for it (never needed to, due to the nature of the game, but that's a whole other story)
I couldn't make out the rivers at first, with the settings from the tutorial though (can't figure out what i did wrong there) so I bevelled them with a pillow emboss at 1px and played with the shading options. I think they are still subtle enough at this scale, but you can see them if you look for them
At first i was thinking it needed more mountains, but then I looked again for awhile and decided i like them the way they are. I brought out the mountain details with some dodging and burning, they look kind of nice, I think.
I'm likely going to make the rivers a bit more wobbly, but I don't think they're completely unnatural
The countries are laid out, and towns etc, I'm about to start going through and replacing the placeholders with actual names next. I'm workin on those in a separate file though, this one killed my laptop memory (1gb) as it is, and it's too painful to sit at the desktop (woot 4 gigs memory there) for long. So I merged this to flat, saved a copy as jpg, and used it as the background for the text layers (sneaky me! yay!)
I'll toss that up later, but I would love feedback on this level.
(and for those complaining about the small size of my last map, I think you'll be happier with this one!)
Last edited by Coyotemax; 07-21-2009 at 06:16 PM. Reason: one of these times i'll review it a third time before submitting..
Looks very nice. I'll have to try the tutorial you used, it seems I passed over it too lightly.
I found the hardest part was getting the continents just right - not the fault of the tutorial though, just because I'm so picky Everything else was nice, and everytime I did a new step I'd go OOH! and wonder how it could possibly get better
You really can't go wrong with any of Ascensions's tutorials... nice job.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Good job, man. You did an excellent job. If there's anything that I could speak to it's that maybe you need a slight brownish inner glow on the mountains so that they aren't all gray...but that is terribly minor and these look good anyhow. Again, good stuff, dude.
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.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
thanks! Of course half the credit is yours for the tutorial, I followed it pretty faithfully untill I got to the end and went back to play around with some settings.
That having been said, I have made more progress (pun intended, I'll explain later).
For your consideration, place names added, and a second bonus map - I've decided to antique it at some point, and ran it through a few quick steps to see how feasible it would be.. And I'm definitely seeing the potential.
There are a fair number of injokes involved in the place names, part of the fun I had was going through the other forum to look for material to add That having been said, there's a little something for everyone, don't worry...
The outer glow is overkill on the atlas but it almost works on the antique. On the atlas you should keep it clean, sharp and legible. On the antique you might want to make the size of the outer glow bigger and lower the opacity some...right now it's making things look very vivid in the middle yet very blurry on the edge. Maybe you could just lower the opacity of the whole layer. It's late and I woke up for some reason so I'm using half blurry eyes trying to get re-sleepy.
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.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Hey nice map, the colouring is great.
I do have one small gripe however, the larger black lettering is a little hard to read, maybe adding an outer glow of white would help. I do it to my lettering but i'm no expert.
Keep up the great work.
-D-
I'm definitely not done with the region names. I had a gold-ish looking version up there, but it doesn't work so well with this font.
I think I'll have to break down and use a second font. I just try not to use too many different ones, it's hard to pull off more than 2 or three different fonts in the same project (webpage, map, etc) in my eyes. (not saying it can't be done, I just cant find a way to make it look right..)
Thx for the feedback.
I'll work on it some more when my back settles down again.
Ok, as much as i love that font, I gave in and decided it's not right for this map. Tirani it is.
And this version includes the tweaked mountains and fixed a few rivers that were bothering me.
Now that I have those issues sorted, I'm about ready to fill in the minor locations and fill out the waterways a bit more.
I think I'm going to leave the parchment version for another week.