The coastlines look vaguely familiar, buuut.... Whuh-what happened to Europe?
The coastlines look vaguely familiar, buuut.... Whuh-what happened to Europe?
Astrographer - My blog.
Klarr
-How to Fit a Map to a Globe
-Regina, Jewel of the Spinward Main(uvmapping to apply icosahedral projection worldmaps to 3d globes)
-Building a Ridge Heightmap in PS
-Faking Morphological Dilate and Contract with PS
-Editing Noise Into Terrain the Burpwallow Way
-Wilbur is Waldronate's. I'm just a fan.
Yeah, I live in Oman, so I figured for this doodle I'd base the map very roughly on the Middle East/Western Indian Ocean area. It makes for a fun variety of terrain types and coastlines.
Thanks!
That is a superb idea. I'll have to give it a try.
Yeah, I've noticed that. I've been playing around with blur and pixel spread on the layer masks, and it actually looks a lot better now that it used to. One idea I'm toying around with is making the layer mask for the mountain color layer a wee bit smaller than the layer mask for the mountain bump layer. I'm hoping this would make it look like the elevation carries some of the underlying terrain (either grass or desert) before it turns into the mountain itself and that this would allow for a smoother transition between the mountains and the flat lands.
Thanks! And thanks for stopping by and commenting.
I tried playing around with a bevel effect, but I could only get it working at all on the north-south running rivers and not the east-west running ones. Compare the "Nile" with the "Ganges" for example. I did a bump map on a Rivers layer with itself. Any ideas how I could go about making it work better?
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Here's the results of my efforts masking away the forest edges. I think it went well...I like the way it looks now better than before, but I'm not 100% happy with how the rivers look. Maybe I ought to try to bevel the rivers a bit anyway, just to give them definition?
Anyway, the way I ended up getting this to work for me was by selecting the alpha in the river layer, inverting the selection, growing the selection by about 5 pixels, and then feathering by about 15 pixels. I found that the resulting path meandered a bit around the rivers.
I think I'll tackle making the upper-rightmost mountain next. I plan to add a layer mask for just that mountain and duplicated the bump map. Hopefully, that'll give the effect I'm looking for without affecting the rest of the mountains.
By the way, a few questions about the map generally. What do you all think of the color scheme? Two of my goals were to have large swaths of clearly differentiated grass and desert, and to have distinct looking sandstone and granite mountains. What do you think? Also, any thoughts on the forests? I spent a fair bit of time trying to get them to look "foresty", and am interested in your thoughts.
Agreed, much nicer. The bevel makes not on the rivers look nice, but I thing it tends to make the river end where it empties into sea/lake look a bit better also. If you can get access to a tablet, from what I have seen from others, the rivers will look so much better as the pressure sensitivity will allow them to start as a small line and get bigger as they go down stream instead of staying a constant width. I hope to get my tablet in the next few weeks. Another possible thing that I have been playing with a bit, though not sure how good it looks yet is to add a fade out to the brush and start the river away from the mountains and draw to the mountains as the brush fades. Not perfect, but it is a cheap way to get somewhat of a fad as you enter the mountains.
Still need work blending the hard line of the mountains.
The blending between grass and desert is superb!
You nailed it. Great look
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Yeah, I would love a tablet. Unfortunately, one's not really in the picture at the moment, so I'm going to have to make do with what I've got. And drool over maps people draw with tablets of course.
Yeah, you're right. I have a few ideas on how to address this.
Thanks!
Okay, new problem. My .xcf file got big. I mean really big. As in 1.5 GB big. Unfortunately, my antiquated PC just couldn't quite handle it very well - it was taking upwards of 5 minutes to simply show a layer. So, I've decided to chalk that map up as an educational experience and start afresh. This time, I'm going to try to post the steps I take along the way here, in the theory that by explaining what I'm doing, I'll learn it better.
So, here's the basic coast outline of the new map. I decided to make it about 1/4 the size of the first map (5.5"x4" instead of approx 11.5"x8.5") in order to keep the size from getting out of hand.
One of the problems I noticed toward the end of the earlier map was that in areas my coast was too right-angle-y (if that's even a word). I think the problem may have been that my initial coast outline was too detailed, preventing RobA's TLS from producing maximum effect. So, this time, I've made the coastlines quite a bit less detailed.