My first map, WIP

[DanChops]

Okay, now that I'm done with the sea and underlying land layers, it's time to start with mountains. I'm going to try a bit of a divergence from Rob's tutorial with the mountains. Instead of using the mountain colors to color in the entire area covered by the mountain bump map, I'm going to color in a smaller area inside the bump map. I'm hoping that this will create the illusion of hills surrounding the mountains, and will assist with blending the mountains in with their surroundings.

That's the plan anyway. Let's see how it works out.

First, I need to figure out where to put the highlands. I decided to sketch in where I imagined the tectonic plates would be. (Hey, it's a fantasy map, right? Just because I'm roughly basing the coastlines on a region of earth doesn't mean I have to follow real tectonic plates, right?)

The tectonic plates (and their rough directions of movement) are in red. (The dotted line indicates where the large plate is splitting itself in two.


This image shows where I'll be doing a height bump map for the hills along with the plates.


And this is just the hills outline.

Well, lets see how this turns out!