Looking for some critical feedback on Star Wars maps

[atpollard]

I'm really light on the foliage and the terrain can feel barren.

So much of what you are asking comes down to personal taste, that it is hard to know what will help you.

So I will start with some general advice that works for me.
... check out the maps of buildings and villages done by others. Don't worry about whether their subject matter is even remotely related to what interests you, just SEE the variety of graphic styles and techniques and let that stir your imagination to the possibilities available to you. I like the WIP (work in progress) threads because they let you see HOW it is created. If you spot some interesting technique on a drawing that you like but don't really see how they did it ... then ask them. That's how I learn new things here, and the primary reason that I like to come here. I don't really draw many medieval/renaissance maps on aged parchment ... but I can see and learn new things even by studying how other's create old parchment.

Three specific examples, to illustrate the above:
1. I saw a technique on a border for a map that looked like words carved into marble. I asked the artist how he did that and he gave me some photoshop advice. Create the text in white and set the layer to 'darken'. This makes the text invisible. Now apply features like bevel and emboss to the text. The text is still invisible, but the effects are visible and the words are carved into the background. Here is an example of how I used the technique to create a key for a larger map:


2. The same techniques that make parchment look realistically aged (multiple layers of 'grunge' overlaid at a very low opacity) will work for making the metal floor in a starship cargo bay look aged. Like this:


3. The tutorial for creating a medieval fantasy map of a continent, can be used to create a planet for a space opera game. Like this:




Now for some specific advice for your plants:
This is something I did for my last project ... they wanted a spaceship crashed on a barren world with mutated forest of giant ferns spreading from the crashed ship ... so the colors are probably not something that you will want to reuse, but the technique might give you some ideas (or you will decide that this is not the look that you want, so then go check out the other village maps and find a style that is what you are looking for).

1. start with the sand/dirt that the plants will cover:


2. add some sort of groundcover. Note that the layer is not 100% opaque so the sand can still show through ... nature likes to blend patterns and textures and colors on subtle layers. One thing that I tend to like in photoshop is to use the render clouds filter to create soft light and dark areas in each layer ... experiment to find what you like.


3. create a pattern for plants; notice that it is not particularly realistic to any individual plant, the goal is to create naturalistic patterns of light, dark and shades of color. Create a stamp for the plants and use that to make a black and white mask for the plant pattern layer. Apply the mask to the pattern and add and special features ... I often like to add a small shadow to just hint that the plants are above the groundcover. Depending on the type of plant, you might want to set the layer at less than 100% opaque. With some plants, you catch glimpses of the ground below them through gaps in the leaves.


4. next I place a white grid set at 15% opaque. I adjust the opacity of the grid so that it is as light as I can make it and still keep it usable. The exact opacity is different for every map ... some are even as low as 2% or 3%. As a rule, I tend to prefer black grids over a light background and light grids over a dark background, but always as faint as I can live with. In this particular case, I placed the grid above the plants/shrubs and below the fern trees because I didn't want the grid to distract from the trees. If the shrub/plants had been more scattered, I would probably have placed the grid under the shrubs as well, but these shrubs were too close together, so I moved the grid up a layer.


5. Repeat the same technique as the plants/shrubs for the trees. Texture. Mask. Shadow. Note the shadow is larger and the trees are actually 90% opaque. I had to make them fairly opaque because the trees were so light and the plants so dark. Normally, I would make the trees more transparent and the shrubs much lighter ... so you could see both.




Another tree technique that I used once and liked was to create opaque tree trunks (like for a battle map or a typical plan view of a column), then overlay each trunk with branches at around 50% opaque (so you could see both the branch and what was below the tree), and then I overlaid the branches with a top view of a tree at about 25% opacity.

So there are some ideas.
I hope they are helpful.