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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
So, this is my next try. I deliberately used different textures though I like these I used in my first try also a lot.
This has now sea, grass, dirt, hills, foothills and mountains.
I like how the grass texture looks after i put a slight bump on it - a lot of vegatation with not much effort.
And for the foothills and mountains I generated bump maps with RobA's methods, put a texture on them for colouring and bumped this texture also - I think the combination of these bump maps looks quite natural.
Added forests and rivers now and also river valleys. I like this result very much, I think I have found what I was looking for.
In my opinion the forest texture looks a bit blurry compared to the mountains.
Otherwise good work!
Looking good, yeah though the forest looks a little blurry and a little flat... try bump mapping it on itself?
Many thanks for the rep, people!
I agree about the forests - somewhere in the process I blurred it too much I think. I already had a bump map on it, so I copied it and the result looks better, but still not as sharp as the mountains. Can't do much about it now other than redoing the forest.
I added cities, roads and a border which match the overall colour scheme quite well. Hmmm...some of the town "buttons" are a bit big if I look it now.
I'm not in the mood to add more labels - the map is already quite crowded as it is.
looks good... not sure you could do much about the forests without redoing them at this point... but that's be simply something to save for the next map of this style
Also that's a pretty sweet labeling... and yeah it's busy enough...
I think I'd find some place for a cartouche (in the water's always good) with a scale and region title... and call it done!
Cartouches, labels, compass roses, scale bars...this is all a bit tedious in GIMP when you are used to Campaign Cartographer.
I will add a cartouche later when I'm in the mood.
The next step for me now is trying to recreate the map style especially on a larger scale map and taking notes for myself how I did it.
To exactly recreate the look of the last map won't be possible because I did a lot of tweaking with blur, opacity, hue/saturation and so on. Also the scale will be a problem.
Does anyone know if it's possible in GIMP to change the scale of a texture when applying it? Or do I have to rescale a texture manually into a new one and put this one also into the patterns folder?
I created a quick sketch for my next practice/test map with the size 2400 X 1600, which is the map size I'm planning for.
I will show you the results of each kind of map element in this thread. If this is too boring for you please tell me.
This is the rough sketch of the map:
dark blue: sea (obviously )
light blue: rivers/lakes
medium green: grass
light green: hills
dark green: forests
yellow: steppe
dark cyan: swamp/marshland
dark orange: dirt/barren
orange: foothills
light gray: mountains
dark gray: roads
black: cities/towns/villages/keeps
red: borders
So, first part is done but it was quite an effort to recreate the sea. This may be because I used 3 textures, cloud noise and a bump map .
It looks a bit blurry and busy now but I think is impression will change when the land is added.
I found out, that my favorite grass texture is not seamless, so I had to smear the borders a bit. I hope this won't be too evident in the final result.