Reply With QuoteLe bump.
I've cobbled together some mountains and I'm not sure I like them. They're better than they were before and I'm not sure I can improve upon them any more. Any advice you guys have would be helpful.
Bumping with an overhauled map.
I put together some noise layers with some transparencies on them and overlaid them to try and get a good vegetation effect going. I redid the grass with new textures and added a simple height map to the desert. Mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. are going to be a long time coming. I'll probably reduce the opacity of the desert's height map to make it less pronounced when I get a chance to work on this again, and I'm re-thinking the scale for simplicity's sake. 800-1000 miles across. That still makes for a pretty freaking huge desert and will still require thin, sinuous mountains drawn in layers (layers of layers, actually) but means I have to place fewer cities and forts.
Last edited by Gregorus Prime; 09-14-2009 at 01:18 AM.
Le bump.
I've cobbled together some mountains and I'm not sure I like them. They're better than they were before and I'm not sure I can improve upon them any more. Any advice you guys have would be helpful.
Just examples, no advice. Here are a couple of large basins mostly surrounded by large mountains.
The California Central Valley is a little smaller than you had in mind, but if the whole area were flipped 180 degrees around I would expect some fairly harsh deserts in the valley area rather than just the basin/range province to the East. Speaking as someone who live on the downwind side of those mountains in their current configuration, it's prettty harsh.
The Taklimakan basin is probably closer to what you had in mind. It's more of a cold/dry desert than hot/dry, but it's fairly close in side to what you were describing. The high mountains and thin rivers threading out from them are great fun to look at from stellite photos.
Mtns look pretty good. Look like keepers to me. The only thing that I could suggest for them is some color variation...they're all brown. Toss in some blacks and grays here and there or maybe some green forests climbing the slopes.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
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They're about as good as I'm going to get them for the amount of work I'm willing to do. These were never meant to be fully representational maps to begin with, just pretty-looking abstracts.
I've added some lakes and rivers. The rivers are a bit too thick, I think. I'll have to re-do the layer mask and the shores after that. There will be some greenery surrounding the oases in the desert and along the mountains once I get to working on it again. I'm feeling kind of burned out on maps for the moment and will probably spend the rest of the evening hammering out some more backstory.
EDIT: I lied. One more version with thinned-out rivers.
Last edited by Gregorus Prime; 09-18-2009 at 12:27 AM.
Tentative final map. Starting labels.
It's come a long way, looking forward to seeing it completed.
One thing that I noticed is that the forests look flat - you might try a slight drop shadow on them to give them a sense of 'depth', and I think I would drop the ocean texture on the small lakes and just go with the solid color.
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As SG stated, this map has come along way!
Looking great.
-Rob A>
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Wow, praise from Caesar.
Did a bit of work on the map itself but the bulk of my work over the past two days has been the placement and naming of cities and forts.
I post this rough version here to ask if anybody can see any glaring flaws in those two things.
Last edited by Gregorus Prime; 09-22-2009 at 04:16 AM.
Some of your text labels are 'bleeding' into the background, you might try a thin dark stroke around your text to help eliminate that.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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