The Western Baronies

[Greason Wolfe]

I'm really digging on those forests. Great work. As for the river turns being tight, while it might not be a common thing in nature, it does happen. The North Fork of the Siuslaw River (Florence OR) has a couple of near hair-pin type turns as it makes its way out of the mountains to join up with the main river. If you're really concerned about it though, you could, if it's not too late, plop a couple of rocky spurs where the turns are fairly tight to give a "more visible" reason for the more drastic changes of direction.

GW

Edit - For the sake of argument, here's a sample of the river I mentioned. The area circled in red equates to approximately 5 miles (as the fish swims, and as I used to try to catch them), and, as you can see, there are some extremely tight bends. Again, it might not be common, but it does happen.

[arsheesh]

Hey thanks for pointing this out Greason Wolf, makes me feel a little more relieved that my rivers are perhaps not altogether absurd. OK, so I have been working on adjusting the color and texture of the base landscape, as well as the color of the trees (as per Ascension's advice). Also added a title. The next step will be to add villages and other geographical features.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Diamond]

That's looking really great; good 'feeling' to the base landscape (if that makes senses ). I like that title idea too - it's clean and simple and nice-looking. I might have to steal that, if you don't mind...

[arsheesh]

Thanks Diamond, and by all means, be my guest. Although I must give credit to both Torstan and Carnifex for inspiration for the title layout (each of them did something similar with one of their maps, though I can't remember which ones now).

[Diamond]

Oh, that's right; I remember Carnifex did one like that. Well, thanks for the idea to everyone involved.

[Ascension]

The rivers are one thickness all the way through...try making some fatter parts and skinnier parts. Just my 2 cents there. As for the forests, what I do is to make a new layer of green and orange clouds (or green and tan), ctrl-click on the forest layer, invert the selection, delete and then pick a nice blend mode...I usually go with color or hue. This way I get some variation in color other than light green and dark green...I get some browns.

[Greason Wolfe]

That's starting to look really nice now. The adjustments to the base landscape give it a little more depth and let the rolling nature of the terrain show up just a little better than before. All in all, I'd say it's coming along quite nicely.

GW

[moutarde]

This is looking really nice so far Arsheesh I think Ascension's suggestion about a coloured cloud layer to the forests could really help, they're still looking just a smidge blocky, and the clouds should really help break that up.

[arsheesh]

I appreciate the advice on the forests guys. Unfortunately however, I'm not sure if the method that I've used to create these forests is compatible with what Ascension has suggested. Here is how I created the forests (this is similar to the method described in this tutorial). First I generated a set of turbulent solid noise clouds (which I then turned into a tiled pattern so that the clouds would be even smaller). Then, after several steps which involved getting the basic shapes of the forests that I wanted, I deleted the rest of the clouds layer that wasn't going to be used. I then filled the remaining clouds with HSV noise. Then I created a solid gray layer which I "bump mapped" from the clouds layer, thus creating the bumpy forest texture. The tree bumps layer is what I have been using as the base layer on which all of the subsequent colors have been layered. If I were to add an additional clouds layer on top of this (unless I'm simply missing something here), it would obscure the tree bumps layer below it. I actually did try to duplicate the existing tree bumps layer, cut out some individual clumps and create individual layers of color for those, but was not pleased with the results (the result was not a well blended forest, but rather a patchy brown and green forest).

So at this point I'm not sure what to do, other than to simply work on blending the color layers rather than messing with the base clouds layers. However, if I am missing something important here, I'm open for correction. Thanks again Ascension and Moutarde for pointing out the need for improvement here.

[tilt]

I got a bit lost in the description but heres my 2 cent - I do believe you should be able to put in an adjustment layer and by switching to hue changing the color - you can then with the use of a mask first mask out anything not forrest and then selecting the mask - make a cloud filter within. Otherwise feel free to mail me the file and I'll check it for you