May/June 2009 Lite Challenge Entry: Golden Sands

[Lathorien]

I like your mountains, their different that the usual styles. Over all and excellent start!

[Ascension]

That's a good lookin delta. I also like the play of the blue-slightly purple water against the yellow-slightly green land.

[JoeyD473]

Like Ascension, I love the coloring

[msa]

Here is the second revision of my map, and I've added most of my terrain features now. The new revisions includes:

• Forests - not many of them... appropriate for my desert map
• River texture - Some fading at the edges to help them blend in better with the map, and some detail along the path of the river to give it a little more depth
• Improved wasteland - Trying to create the feel of a broken, blasted desert (the work of an ancient civilization that experimented to heavily with necromancy and destructive magics)

Thanks for the positive feedback! Here are my direct replies:

@Lath, the first few weeks of my mapping have all been about mountains, in particular creating a long, gradual decrease in elevation that results in pronounced foothills. These are actually very similar to the mountains with gimp mountain tutorial here. I'm fairly happy with the result, although I think some more experience will help them further. I made a few changes:

• Combine the clouds with a layer of blurred noise to create some finer granularity elevation changes
• Create 2-4 additive layers of this noise covering foothills to peaks.
• Near the coast, I use the elevation heightmap to define the coastline instead of fading the mountains away based on the pre-mountain coastline.

@Asce and Joe, thanks I like the colors a lot too. For the record, there is no red in the ocean or green in the land (except around the fresh water). They are pure blue and yellow-orange respectively, although there is a significant amount of gray mixed in. I think I'm partial to the low-saturation colors.