Good Morning Everybody.

[Korash]

Well, Gimpster, I think your WIP is well on its way but I do have a few points. I understand that you are still working on it, but I am still a bit confused as to where the crossing is to be. It LOOKS like you want the crossing to be done at a bridge to be placed where the river bank is darkest. In that case I will assume that you are going to be darkening the rest of the river bank as well. I say this because it seem like the only place i wouldn't cross is at that location. The rest of the banks look much easier to navigate.

Another thing that i noticed is that as a battlemap, there does not seem to be much in the way of cover. It appears to consist of small shrubs, grass and dirt. I would suggest adding some trees or large rock formations if you want it it be more barren. The rock could be showing through a very thin earth layer that limits large plant growth. Just give the rocks some height and add one or two trees to give some sort of visual clues to scale and you would be good.

I also must say that i am not really a fan of the water texture and colour that you are using for the river. It does look like it would be a good texture for a bump map on a bluer color. If you go that route, I would say that it would be a very fast moving river (ie: steep and shallow over a rough bed) and I would make the sides nor rocky.

All that, and I still say it looks good so far. just keep an eye on the scale of the drawing and try to math the textures that you use to fit that scale. I know that is still a WIP so you are still working on it, and feel free to ignore my suggestions if you have already thought of them of they make no sense to what you want. I wouls also further suggest that you post this WIP in the Battlemap WIP thread else where in the Guild. You will get MUCH better response to it than having it buried in an intro thread. Not everybody come to look at these, but most will look at the WIP threads.

And once again, another sever/terminal case of longwindedness.

[Gimpster]

Korash,

Thank you for the input. I still have a lot to learn for sure. The darkness was to represent an increase in elevation for allow for the clearance for a bridge to be placed over a fast moving stream which would be more difficult to try and ford, but I see your point.

The maps lacks cover items because as you assumed they have not yet been added. I was not happy adding in every single rock, bush and tree one at a time in layer upon layer from mapping object files and instead added them in using Map-Tool. Since then I have started to embrace d20Pro which lacks the same map building robustness and am starting to learn other techniques for adding those elements in Gimp.

The river/stream did not come out as I would have liked. I was trying to go for a more photo realistic look and most rivers and streams I have seen are not blue, but I defiantly need to work on that more. It's just not right yet. I would agree that the water in battle maps does need to be more stylized then my current attempt.

The texture scale is defiantly in need of some scaling. I either need to double the size of the image or scale the textures down by a factor of 2 to make them fit the drawing scale better.