The Middle Abi Valley

[Pixie]

Hi there

I just woke up an old thread of mine, cachting up on the ambitious plan that is modeling (by hand) a whole planet. But while there is fun in that task for the next years, being a member here also made me more attentive to the actual mapping science of labeling and such, and from times to times I take information from that huge map and have a go at making regional maps for the sake of practice.

Here's one of them. This is my latest endeavour, and I wanted to emulate a sort of early XXth century style.

This started with a tiny area that was then enlarged (resulting in huge squares where there were only pixels).

A little bit of this...


Turned into this:


From there, I outlined the limits of each height level, added intermediary levels, added quite a lot more detail, added lines (rivers, roads, cities, railways), added color, added labels, added texture, added aging effects....

The end result is very far from those green blobs. The end result, and that is actually what I am showcasing, is this:


Inspiration came from a lot of places, in bits and pieces, but there's one part of my map which needs to be credited. The coloring scheme is very close (intentionally) to this one:

[J.Edward]

Really nice clean map Pixie. It looks great.
I really like the style and color scheme.

[Ilanthar]

Great map! I've always loved that kind of old atlas map style. The aging is excellent, maybe a little bit strong for some small inclined labels, but overall a very nice job!

[- Max -]

Very nice work Pixie.

[Slylok]

That is a cool map. I really like it.

[Pixie]

Thanky you to all. I'm really proud of this map, and your comments make me even happier with it.

Ilanthar, it was difficult to keep a balanced aging. On hindsight, after your comment, maybe I could have applied slight different aging to different font sizes, but it's too late now. This aging was done applying a noise effect and then a gaussian blur to the labels, after they were all merged as a "flat layer". Parameters are subtle - like 6% noise, 0,4 pixels blur. It was a bit of a struggle to age the thicker lines enough without aging it thinner ones too much.

The colorscheme, as I said, it's not my invention, but I don't mind taking credit for the choice.