World of Eimarith

[kenbanistu]

Ok. Here's the plan. I want to map out a world that is 10,000 square miles. To sort of keep things organized, I have divided the world up into 1000 square mile regions, and each region is chopped up into areas that are 100 square miles. That means that each map I make will cover 100 square miles.

I am using Gimp for this. I am not trying for a high level of realism in the look of the terrain. High realism takes too much time ( I have tried Rob A.'s regional map tut, and it is very good, but it takes me a very long time to make a map with it and I have trouble with the forests).

I plan on making the terrain as random as possible. What is land and what is sea is random. The shape of the land is random. The shape and placement of the forests is random. The same is true for the lakes and mountains.

Here is the first map. Not a lot of land in this first one. The grass is just green with a little HSV noise added. The forests are a darker green with a lot of HSV noise. The mountains are brown overlayed with some cloud noise and then bump mapped. I don't like how the mountains look so I've tried something different on the second map (it's not done, otherwise I would post it). It's a shortened version of something I saw in one of Rob A.'s mini-tuts involving an angular shaped gradient and I like the results better than what I did here.

--Ken