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I'd say this is a very good map for a beginner. Wilbur can take a while to get the hang of and you've done a good job with it here.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Talonwind Isle - Regional Map of an Old Campaign World
This is the first map I've done that I felt worthy of posting here. It's an attempt to create a somewhat realistic atlas style map. It's an island off the southern coast of an even larger island. I thought it would be easier to start with a something small then trying to get this much detail into a continent size land mass.
The original map was hand drawn on paper and then imported via scanner. I colored in what I thought would be a rough height map in Photoshop and then exported a grey-scale image of that file into Wilbur. After eroding, adding noise and re-sampling the image, I imported it back to photo-shop to manipulate the colors, lighting, ocean and river features. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the color scheme right now, but it's still a work in progress. Most of the time spent manipulating the map was agonizing over the distance scales. Once that was nailed down, I put in the distance and elevation scales and drew in a border. The corners of the map indicate the planet's four moons, which was a map design suggestion of a friend of mine.
As far as what I need to do, I still need to add in some graphics of the moons themselves. Additional place names for mountains, ridge-lines, and towns and cities etc. will be coming down the road when I get a spare moment.
As far as some background history, this island is a somewhat recent (re?)-discovery and is in the midst of being colonized and having its resources exploited. It's also being used as a base of operations to counter the growing threat of the regional power to the island to the north. Therefore, most of the civilized areas are nothing more than small forts or camps. There are ruins scattered across the northern part of the island (which I'll need to add to the map) indicating previous inhabitants, but whoever they may have been is still a mystery.
I welcome any comments or feedback you may have.
I'd say this is a very good map for a beginner. Wilbur can take a while to get the hang of and you've done a good job with it here.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
While your map clearly has a lot of work to go, what you have is very nice! It's always good to have the backstory early, so as you develop the map, you know what places and kinds of places you need for the story. I'm looking forward to seeing the next draft!
Thanks for the positive feedback and for the rep
Still working on the colours and adding more names to rivers, mountains and other places of interest. I had to print off a working copy so that I could sketch in some place names before finalizing them in Photoshop which can be a bit time consuming placing text, especially along paths.
Hilded
Okay. I've added some more place names for some settlements, ruins, coastal features and so forth. I lightened the land colors to make a lot of the names easier to read. I might have overdone it though, it's looking too washed out, methinks. Printing off a paper copy and roughing in the place names in pencil helps in the creative process in coming up with names in the first place. I find that I can forget some names when trying to adjust paths, font spacing, placement and other details. There are quite a number of layers in this beast now. It's taxing my old computer to the max.
Once again, I welcome your feedback.
Hello there, Hilded!
I'm a complete novice here in CG and also with image tinkering and cartography in general, so yeah...keep that in mind when checking my feedback ^_^
Color - I like the softer setup on the second image, but it hints me to a colder place (might be the white-ish setup) while the first image makes me believe it's a more tropical area due to more vivid green and such. Dunno if that was your intetion, but that was what I thought the first second looking at each of them.
Terrain - Your island seem extremly hilly and river-ish to me. Basically speaking in terms of the world, per se, is it for a RPG campaign or setting? That would be kinda a pita for moving resources around and such, unless all rivers can be navigated and doesn't have great perils...
Labels - Myself I'm struggling to get a nice setup for my map labels and I really like yours in the sense all yours are readable and quite understandable and I like the fonts used.
Why was the island lost at some point and being re-discovered now? If it was, at some point, populated...shouldn't there be more traces of such presence in the island? More ruins...changes to the land?
Yeah, I find it easier to read the labeling with the de-saturated colors. Keep in mind the color scheme is supposed to represent height and not terrain type. Perhaps if I made the topographical lines more distinct and tinted the height levels a bit more, it would help clarify that especially in relation to the elevation legend. (I still have to match those colors to the map now that I've lightened the map). This island is in the southern hemisphere of the world it's from, around 30 or 40 degrees latitude. I was thinking it would have a climate similar to New Zealand.Originally Posted by TK.
Being a recent (re)discovery, there isn't a lot of infrastructure yet. Most of the new settlements are located along the major rivers and are reached by ship or boat. Basically, the portions of the rivers that are light blue are navigable by larger vessels. This particular island is located on the far western edge of the "known world" in the old campaign that I ran. We never really visited it in game. It was going to be someplace the characters would visit in the future. When I started to go through my old maps after I found this site, I figured this island would be a good starting point for map design. An easier and more achievable goal than making a vast continent.
Thanks. I'm getting used to making paths in PS and placing text on them. It's a lot easier than when I first tried the technique.
I should probably add a few more ruins, but the ones that are displayed on the map are the ones that have undergone an initial survey (plundered) or recently discovered (haven't yet been plundered). I want to be careful in how many places of interest i put on there. I don't want to obscure all the terrain features. I'm thinking maybe not enough people have explored the island yet to name everything?
What caused the previous inhabitants to disappear? That's the mystery. Many of the explorers who have surveyed the ruins have asked the same questions. Mount Onyx has indications of lahars flowing out from it's slopes in the surrounding rivers and lava flows along it's slopes, which would indicate some recent volcanic activity. Perhaps it was a catastrophic eruption. But that wouldn't explain the ruins on other parts of the island that date from the same time. Perhaps a war? Disease? Social collapse? A storm of meteors? No one knows for certain.
Thanks for the input. The feedback keeps me motivated in finishing. Hopefully, I'll have a final map by the end of this weekend or next.
