Half of Terran World Map

[Xeviat]

Thanks for that link. I'm not in a position to spend money on this now (more so than PS already cost me), but I'm happy to see other resources.

Oh, and here's what I came up with for my new coastline.

http://www.thecbg.org/e107_files/pub...an_outline.jpg

(The image is too large to put here, as this forum doesn't auto shrink it)

[RobA]

I see the mmcloud filter is not at the website I linked to.

Attached.

-Rob A>

[Xeviat]

Thanks RobA, much props. I'll fiddle with it and see what it can do. In the mean time, anyone have feedback on how things look so far? Should I use the coastline trick to make the mountains a bit more organic as well?

I'm going to be going through all of the tutorials here (in fact I intend to go through RobA's "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map" tutorial and see how it feels). But maybe you all can give me a few pointers on the things I want to do on a global scale:

1: Map Elevation. Along with the mountains, land, water, and air/water currents, elevation will help me in setting climates (I have a few resources that aid in getting general bands, maybe others have better ones?).
2: Climates. Plotting out general climate tendencies like humid tropical, humid temperate, hot and dry, and cold and dry. I have real world maps and a few resources to help.
3: Biomes. Forest, Grassland, Desert, Tundra, you know it all. Climate helps here.

I'm not looking for regional level detail yet, but I'd like to have a nice map with multiple layers for all the purposes I could need. I'm shooting for believability over accuracy, but I want things to look organic.

Thanks all.

[RobA]

Some Links (culled from some old threads)...

Check out this thread and possibly Geoff's Climate Cookbook.

Another good reference for both climate and geology is Expeditious Retreat Press' A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping, which is a free-to-download chapter from the larger A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture book.

(And if you like that one, try also A Magical Medieval City Guide.)

This whole thread

-Rob A>

[ravells]

The coastlines look great, although I think they need a little cleaning up in some areas where the lines do something funky.

[Xeviat]

I actually have the books from Expeditious Retreat Press, those are the main parts of my climate resources. I'll look over the others.

Where did you think the coastline looked odd?

[ravells]

Attached is a bit of example coast that looks odd -although it might just be an artifact caused by the scale of the zoom.

[Xeviat]

Attached is a bit of example coast that looks odd -although it might just be an artifact caused by the scale of the zoom.

Thanks for pointing that out. I just need to delete the white in those coastal lakes. Those islands were altered using ocean ripple; that's the sort of effect you can get (that very broken island chain to the south of three was done with the cloud effect, but I had to scale the clouds down to a very small area.

I discovered another effect with the clouds that might be very useful for some people. If you want to make an island chain that has many random islands, like the Philippines for instance, that all go in one direction (as most island chains do), here's the trick: make a white area for where you want the islands, and blur it enough that the blur extends through the whole white area (you can limit how far the blur goes away by wrapping it in a lasso first).

Then, when you make your cloud effect, scale it down so it is only under the island chain in question. If you scale it non-uniform, like turning it from a square to a rectangle, you can create longer islands that flow in mostly the same direction. Also, I haven't tried it yet, but I think if you were to use one of the transforms to give it an 'S' curve or something, you could create the same effect in the islands.

Thanks for being here guys. You've given me a new hobby. Maybe I'll get better with Photoshop soon.