First Map/WIP

[PixelFish]

I just want to echo Steel General's remark. This is coming along nicely for a first map, but a little blending would not go amiss to ease between the terrains. The real world example that first pops into my head is Hawaii--mountains with lush rainforests from all that rain--so I went and looked up a topographic and terrain map of Hawaii. Here's a few for some ideas to refer to:

http://geology.com/state-map/hawaii.shtml
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...hic_map-fr.svg
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volc...iioverlay.html - more topographic with a terrain map beneath, but it gives you an idea about the terrain transitions (the colours are kinda scary but it might still be useful.)

You can see there's a sort of sloping off from the more drastic reaches of the mountainous areas. I think adding a small rim of intermediary terrain between the forest and the mountains might help.

[Bloodwolf]

Any ideas of where I can find a blending technique? I was wondering how to get the jarring transition cleaned up and tried some of the blurring and stuff, but they don't really work well for me.

Mostly, these are my attempts to get the basics of the tutorials down and I'll take any advice I can get. It has been a lot of hit and miss with experimenting over the last week. It has been really fun, though.

[jfrazierjr]

Any ideas of where I can find a blending technique? I was wondering how to get the jarring transition cleaned up and tried some of the blurring and stuff, but they don't really work well for me.

Check out my tutorial on Layer Masks(in sig). What you would want to do is to make your mountains textured area larger than you want them to be, and then create layer mask and G. Blur the layer mask itself with no selection. That will make the layer mask go from a hard transition, to a soft one between two layers.