The World of Aeryl

[Ra-Tiel]

First off, I rather like the shape of the world, it's very interesting.

Thanks. TerraJ generally produces some very good basic shapes imho, much better than pretty much any other free fractal generator I've seen so far.

Unfortunately, I don't know much about Paint.Net and most of the regulars here either use Photoshop or GIMP. I know we do have at least a lurker or two who use Paint.Net as I remember seeing some maps, so perhaps they can pipe up with suggestions.

No problem, but thanks for the input. I'll be looking around for those lurkers you mentioned.

My first thought is that your color and B/W versions have heavily pixelated lines, especially around land/water transitions, while the original done in TerraJ does not. Not sure if this is something in Paint.Net or perhaps the method it was saved to an output format for posting here. Or perhaps you increased the size from the original image?

That's from the Fragment filter I used to get the texture effect on the water bodies. I wanted to apply some blur to that afterwards, but then somehow forgot it. Mea culpa.

Next on your main continent, at the NW corner of the "cracked" earth part(desert?) and at the very Southern tip of the same, there is a really hard line, so you may want to look at blurring this transition to the grasslands a bit more. This is not horribly bad on the B/W version, but on the color version, it is really jarring.

The "cracked earth" part is meant to represent the ancient battlefield where Bael Turath (tiefling empire) and Arkhosia (dragonborn kingdom) duked it out with each other in the 4E canon. The fluff from the 4E core books mentiones that during the latter phases of the conflict both sides used terrible weapons that devestated large regions and made them basically barren forever.

But thanks for pointing out these "hard lines". Making the map as well as aging it took basically my whole sunday afternoon, and when I realized I messed that part up I was too lazy (and tired) to go back and redo a whole hour's work.

Finally, you should look to see if any other techniques would produce more distinctive mountains. If Paint.Net has forums, you might also want to check over there to see if anyone has done some top down mountains and could give you some pointers. Also, check some of the tutorials here to see if any of the techniques used to make mountains might have a close analog in Paint.Net that you can emulate.

Thanks, I will definitively look into the tutorials here if I can yoink something for Paint.NET.

As for the text and labeling and stuff, you really do need some kind of scale to be able to determine what is too much if you get my drift.

What exactly do you mean?

Also, you could always keep your main map without labels and drill down to create regional maps with more detail such as names for town, mountain range, , desert, forest,etc.

Good idea, if only I wouldn't suck so much at making local maps. But I'll definitively look into that and experiment around with the idea.

Good luck with the rest of the map.

Thanks!

Joe

Regards, Ra-Tiel.