Aurellia - Regional campaign map

[Robbie]

I did that and ended up with the world of 40 thousand lakes...bleh...

I'd like to manually paint in lakes if possible, unless I've just totally screwed the pooch on this world from that tutorial ya gave me?

[waldronate]

To remove the many little lakes that might be generated, use Tools>>Global Set>>Water Level Value with a value of 0. This action puts the level back to the original sea level (0).

You get lots of little lakes because fractal functions have hills and valleys at all scales (self-similarity sorta dictates that). Post-processing such as filling basins and so on works well, but you're limited by practical resolution issues.

One thing you can try is to eliminate the fractal function and use FT as a simple heightfield editor like Wilbur. You'll be limited to the editing resolution of your world, which is a bummer. The "Burn Into Surface" option evaluates the world, places the results into the offset channel, and sets the roughness to 0, effectively removing the fractal function contribution. Fill basins should then fill basins exactly and not have the problem of slight variations causing little lakes everywhere. As always, try this on a COPY of your .ftw file, not on the only version.

[Robbie]

Just fired this back up...circles are cities, towns, villages...squares are keeps or fortresses, diamonds are ruins, house shapes are religious. I think thats everything. I basically did a bunch of photoshop stuff to a bunch of layers exported from FT...I think its working out pretty well...the color layer MAY eventually become hand sketched, as well as the altitude layer...not sure yet...

The only thing this is missing is the roads. I'm kinda going for a cross between my own original style and some handsomerob style, but I don't think I'm getting my own style in there just yet. What do you guys think?

BTW...this is all FT and Photoshop. The yellow line is the kingdom border.

[ravells]

I love the grainy texture. It looks like you can run your fingers over the map and feel it.

If you're using photoshop, just as an experiment, it might be worth changing the colour of the large region names to a browny colour with a large dark brown stroke, setting the layer to overlay and using a displacement map of a blurred version of the underlying map.

For the forests, rather than just a uniform semitransparent colour through which the land texture shows, you might want to use a different fill texture and again use a displacement map.

Depends on the effects that you're shooting for though.

Example below.

[Robbie]

Nice, thanks Ravs I did experiment a little with some more layer effects and textures...I don't really want to use a texture overlay on the forests, but I did give it that inner glow and I gave it a brown shadow to simulate its "majesty" hehehe.

I like the text effect you did for the mountain range things. I need to export a height map before I can use it though...Thanks Here's an update.

[ravells]

No worries Robbie. You don't need a heightmap to get that lettering effect. Just convert your underlying map to greyscale and blur it a bit. Then save it as a separate file. Put down your lettering on a new layer and choose filter/distort/displacement and load the blurred greyscale as your selection and that should do it.

[jfrazierjr]

The (predominant) water effect is REALLY nice. I am not to keen on the few dark bits in the bay and the dark parts past the large island sheltering the bay though....They just look to dark and splotchy to me...

[Robbie]

Yeah, thats the FT continental shelf thing...I may edit out the ones in the bay, but the ones off the coast of the island will probably stay.

[Ascension]

This looks really beautiful. Except for that one lil part near aregean strip...looks like some trees that were forgotten to get colored. But otherwise this is really sweet.

[Robbie]

I'm almost ready to call this done...its not very artsy...I'll do an artsy version later, this is primarily a functional map...I made a LOT of changes to this one...some suggested...