Focused Critique - First Map - CAUTION LOAD MAY BE SLOW!

[landorl]

It is a pretty good map so far, but I do have to agree that the rivers are pretty distracting. Even if you have a reason for them having a very unnatural flow pattern, the fact that they are all the same width distracts from the rest of the map, which is pretty good.

[Sigurd]

You know.. when they start to give you that eye, you know, like, what are you doing in there on those COUNTLESS hours in front of the computer honing your skills and reading and studying and learning and practicing and reading some more.. LOL

Is that what I'm doing? Wow I feel much better.

I like your map. It shows you're picking good textures and working for variations that are interesting.

I agree about the rivers, but I think you'd already intuited that.

My suggestion, and its only personal preference here, is that you try for some more neutral over all texture to work into rather than make every part of the map so much texture at similar scale.

I hope I'm being clear?

I think the map suffers from feeling like cut up textures rather than a landmass. For starters, try and place the water on the land layer, not cut away all the land to reveal a shared water layer. The cut away land looks like improbable islands and the water looks like its all at the same height.


Excuse the liberty, maybe I'll be more clear if I tweak your map a bit. I'm working in photoshop - people can be much more helpful with advice if you mention what program you're using.

I covered all your islands in a brown neutral overlay. I picked the colour from your existing sand and tried to unify the textures a bit.

I tried to raise the water colour of your central island rivers to make them seem different from the coast. Introducing the rivers works much better with a complete ground layer to start with .

I selected out all your rivers - I didn't change the shape of them - and I stroked their edge to give them a transition between shore and water.


Does that make it any more clear?

Sigurd

[Karro]

I like the look of the land and the mountains and beaches especially.

As has been pointed out on the rivers, and as you point out yourself, they could use a little work.

A few suggestions:

1.) rivers flow together toward the sea, and rarely split apart. So you'll have multiple streams flowing into one large river. So especially the large, inter-connected river system on the main island is particularly unlikely, where the same water source splits it's flow so many times it's hard to keep track, and empties into the sea in six different places. A more accurate river system would probably have several water sources (usually starting in mountains or springs, etc.) flowing and joining together as they go toward the sea. Of those that end up joining together, you might then end up with two or three river systems usually separated by higher ground.

2.) In particular, one river system seams to cut through a point of high ground on the western side of the main island, where there appears to be a large hill (possibly just an artifact of using clouds to generate terrain variability, but it looks like a large green hill, and the effect is nice, except' it's cut through with a river).

3.) Varying the width: I assume the rivers on some kind of mask layer that is masking out the land. If this is the case, you should have a black-and-white representation of the rivers in the layer's mask. Go to edit the mask, and use black and white brushes to fiddle around the edges until you get something nice and tapered looking. The rivers will be thin toward their source and thicker toward their outlet at the sea.

4.) The Forests: it looks like the green from your forests overlaps all your rivers, and possibly into the lake as well. I would suggest applying the same mask from your rivers onto the forests. This will remove some of the green color from the rivers where they disappear into the forests. A few more advanced techniques can make the river and forest interplay a little more naturally and would look great.