Creeping Death

[torstan]

Looking good.

I think your texture bump map is swamping your mountain shadows a bit. Have a look at this area as an example:


The shadows make it lok like the river is running over hills rather than between them. To sort this out you might want to really emphasise the mountain shadows. I took the liberty of doing a quick overlay to see what it looks like (hope you don't mind!) to get this:


Here's the overlay - as you can see it's really not very smooth or carefully done!


Hope that is useful.

This is a great map - I'm glad to see your style continue to get better. Great stuff.

[Ascension]

Oh, hey good idea. I hardly ever go back and do that bump mapping stuff with dodge/burn but you're totally right. I'll get on that right away.

[Ascension]

How's this look? Added some towns and roads, walls and docks, and did the dodge/burn on a gray overlay bump map thing. I'm not thrilled with the city so I'll keep workin on that as well as the towns in the desert.

[torstan]

Hmm, I still think it could go further. Here's a satellite image to show what I mean:



The mountains are defined by the sharp shadows, and the smaller shadows that show terrain are secondary to those. You can go pretty extreme with the overall mountain shadows.

Otherwise, I like it. I agree with the city, but I've never been able to get good city results on these kind of maps. Interested to see what you end up with though.

[XiaoTie]

Thats a damn awesome map, the land texture is pure awesome.

[Ascension]

Thanks Xiao. I'll be adding this technique into the continent tut I have sometime this week so that you can give it a try if you want.

[Dracontes]

I think the only thing that throws me off here are the snowy bits. I find it odd that they have no steep slopes whatsoever: something I would expect from areas high enough to snow on.

I'm with torstan: sharp shading FTW

[Ascension]

More updates. Went a lil crisper on the ridges but still can't bring myself to go all the way as my method doesn't have as much info as a DEM or GIS map would, started labeling towns, put in some dungeon markers (one of these is where the plague was unleashed from), and a tentative map title. The fonts are arial, angry blue, and angry blue condensed all with 75% verticality.

[Steel General]

Nice job my friend...love that Angry Blue font - it works well for this.

[woekan]

Very pretty. I like the dirty look.