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Thread: WIP- My Homebrew Setting Map

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    Guild Member heathan666's Avatar
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    Post WIP- My Homebrew Setting Map

    I actually started workin' on this like way back when. But after reading a tutorial on her, I came out with this, I still have a few pieces to add, like the desert & badlands, as well as the artic wastes to the south. Tell me what you guys think.
    I know I might go back and change the rivers and such I really don't like how they came out. If this was really scaled those rivers would be like 2 miles wide in most places.


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    Community Leader Gandwarf's Avatar
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    I think it looks nice enough, very colorful. But you are right about the rivers. Also, the light green stuff is forest? It looks like the rivers were put in after the forests, which makes for a weird effect (the rivers are on top of the forest). What's that small round island in the west?
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    The concern with the rivers is that they don't go anywhere, the way this map looks. Of course, rivers empty into the sea, but here they don't appear to.

    It also doesn't look like the start anywhere (rivers are fed primarily by snow-melt and rain runoff from mountains and possibly from springs and other sources like that).

    Finally, rivers merge together from feeder streams, typically not branching until they reach the sea.

    From the map here, I can possibly guess that the rivers are emptying into a couple lakes, but I can't see any reasoning why the lake then doesn't feed something that empties into the ocean.

    Otherwise, it's a good start working in GIMP on this style of map (I style I am slowly trying to work through myself).
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    Community Leader jfrazierjr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Karro View Post
    The concern with the rivers is that they don't go anywhere, the way this map looks. Of course, rivers empty into the sea, but here they don't appear to.

    It also doesn't look like the start anywhere (rivers are fed primarily by snow-melt and rain runoff from mountains and possibly from springs and other sources like that).

    Finally, rivers merge together from feeder streams, typically not branching until they reach the sea.

    From the map here, I can possibly guess that the rivers are emptying into a couple lakes, but I can't see any reasoning why the lake then doesn't feed something that empties into the ocean.

    Otherwise, it's a good start working in GIMP on this style of map (I style I am slowly trying to work through myself).
    What Karro said. Also, I would say that you have to much texture on various parts of the map, making the whole thing look a little busy. Of course, this may just be because this is a WIP and you have not finished it yet, so let's see some more and perhaps you already have some ideas of making this look a little more natural.
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    Guild Member heathan666's Avatar
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    well I wish I knew how to blend it all together better, but the "rough looking green areas" are supposed to signify hill country, whil the more flatter dull green areas are actually swamp lands (yes I know I failed in my attempt to capture see level murky doom). But when I redid the rivers earlier it came out great.

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    Community Leader jfrazierjr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by heathan666 View Post
    well I wish I knew how to blend it all together better, but the "rough looking green areas" are supposed to signify hill country, whil the more flatter dull green areas are actually swamp lands (yes I know I failed in my attempt to capture see level murky doom). But when I redid the rivers earlier it came out great.

    Since you have several things going on, you might consider adding to the original post a quick sketch of your landmass and use colors to indicate what each part of the land is supposed to be. It does not have to be anything fancy, see the September challenge first post for the "template" map and just make a quick one to show what everything is. That might help us nail down specific areas to help with one piece at a time.
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    Guild Member heathan666's Avatar
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    well I'm workin' on it a lil bit at a time, I think I'm gettin' the hang of it, I actually went back through made an adjustment to each primary layer (hills, forrest) etc, and from there created an overall top overlay designed to "lighten" the image....it worked out well, basically blending everything together for me. so it all looks to be on par.

    See




    Edit
    Probably what I should do to blend the hills and grass areas is actually do a gradiant layer and stack them ontop of each other, basically a duel overlay???

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    Guild Artisan landorl's Avatar
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    That's a pretty big improvement. The rivers look much better. The only complaint/comment that I have is that the river in the NW drains into two different oceans. If you have some sort of natural, or supernatural reason for that, then it is o.k., but it is not normally found in nature.

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    Guild Member heathan666's Avatar
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    Lol DM for the win!

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    Its a massive improvement, I would try to reduce the opacity of the texture on what I will call the plains (the rendered clouds layer) and possible merge a few similar layers together to get a less structured look to that layer.

    I think in general you are suffering from the textures on each layer being to large (I am guessing the original for this is quite large). What I do then is render clouds on a much smaller layer and save it as a tileable pattern, then paste this onto a new layer.

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