The Seven Kingdoms of Wrath (A newbie's journey!)

[The Flanston]

Thanks Arilayna & Nian
Brushes are proving tricky. Just found that if I increase the contrast before converting the pic then they stand out much better. And increasing the resolution allows me to keep detail the more I zoom in. Having said that the image is already 342mb and my pooter is having a siezure every time I try to do just an incy bit of rendering!

Think I'll probably end up dividing the main map to work on sections then combine it when I'm finished

[The Flanston]

Hey guys
Not had chance to do much on this over the last week or so. However, just been playing around with brushes in Paintshop pro. They look a bit funny (especially the cities, which were converted from photographs in Photoshop!) but I think they'll be good enough to fill in the map so that I can see where everything goes.



Let me know what you think...

[Diamond]

That is a cool idea! Never thought of converting photos into brushes. Everything looks pretty good together... except the super-blurry coastline/coastal lines.

[RobA]

The only issue I see is the different degrees of blurriness. Some of the trees are sharp, others are soft, ditto for the one city on the right, and the coastline and sea lines/woodcut effect. The mountans and hills are so nice and crisp (great work on those, btw.), it makes the softer objects stand out...

These differences give the appearance of something pieced together rather than created all at once.

Did you use different scaled brushes? Sometimes that can cause fuzziness.

-Rob A>

[The Flanston]

Thanks Diamond / Rob

Yes, there is some difference between the brush scales. I agree about the patched together appearance and the coastline looks fine until I zoom in close like this. Will have to see what I can do about these issues. My main problem is losing detail on the brushes as I scale them down.

Goodness me but there's a lot to learn!

[Urist]

(I'm using Photoshop 7, which only allows me to use 1.7gb of Ram even though the comp has 8. Sigh... )

It might be possible to hack your old 32 bit program so it is Large Address Aware, making it able to use up to 4 GB of RAM on a 64 bit OS.
Here is a forum describing how people do it to computer games.
Of course, it could break something, so always make a backup.

[Lezales]

Any updates on this project ?

[Llannagh]

Hey Flanston!

I had the same trouble as you with the brush transparency. I learned that PS is greyscaling each brush with white being transparent. Pain in the behind, that. What I have done now for my forest is I did completely black outlines of trees and used those as a brush with a slight size jitter, scatter and color dynamics. If you paint those in b&w and then put an overlay on top to color them, the result is quite satisfactory.
Doesn't work with mountains, though.

When I did my mountains I searched for this thread for an eternety but couldn't find it! I knew that there was a thread out there where someone had made fantastic hand drawn mountains, but I couldn't for the life of me remember which thread that was!
Really great mountains.

I also really like the idea of your city brush, but in my opinion they stand out too sharp in the image you posted.

Hope you get some writing done and that you'll continue this project!

[The Flanston]

Hi Llannagh
I know what you mean about the brushes. What I did was make a brush, then make a mask for the brush and fill it in with white. I did several of these on a grid then saved it as a single layer with a transparent background. I then imported the image into Paintshop Pro and exported it as a picture tube. This meant I could paint with the mountains and the 'white' areas remained solid, thus covering up anything they were over lapping.

And I agree about the cities. They don't look right but my drawinf skills were showing their limitations!

As for the mountain thread you mentioned... I think it might have been a thread by -max-. Sketches he did based on the old lorne blaeu maps.

Thanks for your thoughts

Peter

[Poison]

I love the mountain brushes you drew, and they work great on the map! Well done! With drawing skills like that don't you find it easier to draw a map on paper (and then possibly scan and colour it)?