My first map, WIP

[DanChops]

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.

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.

Still need work blending the hard line of the mountains.

Yeah, you're right. I have a few ideas on how to address this.

The blending between grass and desert is superb!

You nailed it. Great look

Thanks!

[DanChops]

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.

[DanChops]

And here is the coastline after applying RobA's TLS. I'm already liking the coastlines much better this time around. Not sure how that island got into the lake in the middle, but I think it has potential, so I'm going to keep it.

[GM's Apprentice]

Thanks for posting this, and for the series of in-progress images. I'll take a good look through this thread tonight.

[DanChops]

Thanks for posting this, and for the series of in-progress images. I'll take a good look through this thread tonight.

Not a problem. I hope you get some use out of the thread, although I suspect that it will be more helpful to me than to anyone else.

[DanChops]

One thing I did with the last map that I'd like to expand with this one is that I created two underlying land layers, rather than the one "grass" layer in RobA's tutorial. I expanded that two three layers this time - a Grass layer, a Desert layer, and a transition layer between the two.

I created a separate mask for each of the three land types, as well as an over all mask of the coastline. This is what it looks like before applying any textures or bump maps or blurs or whatnot.

[DanChops]

The next step was to go through the texture --> bump map --> bump layers for each of the three. I pretty much followed RobA's directions on this one, except that for the desert bump map I used "Plasma" clouds rather than "solid noise." This gives the desert a nice stippled look. I think this is a serviceable alternative to giving the layer HSV noise and then bump maping it to itself, like Rob did with the dirt layer in his tutorial.

After going through the texturing and mapping process for each of the three layers, I made a copy of each and merged the three copies together. Then I applied a Gaussian blur to the merged layer, and to the masks for each of the texture and bump layers. I think the combined effect blended the three layers together nicely.