[Award Winner] Saderan – a tutorial

[razcor]

I must thank you very much for your accurate and useful tutorial! It's outstanding...

Used to make my first map, WIP at the moment, here in Regional/World Mapping

This is the latest version:

[SteamKat]

I really liked this style of map, because the main Saderan map reminds me of when I used to sneak looks in the big world atlas that was in our Elementary School library. I always wanted to know 'what was out there' and I would wonder what it would look like for real. The maps were to me, the first photographs of the other side of the world. I decided that since he had a tutorial up (The one I'm replying to..) that I would share my progress. I must admit however, that "Step Two" had me confounded a few times. I just have a hard time going down one column then back up to read hte rest, and not go straight down as the pages in the PDF go. I found I had to back up several times, erase 4 layers of work - because either it didn't make sense, or I knew I had gotten confused with order again. I kept trying, throwing in a few tricks I know, and this is how my sea floor is turning out thus far.. - I do have plans to make parts of my 'ocean' much more prominent, but I love the downplayed aspect of this. I think I'm going to continue with the method of a muted ocean map - or perhaps do another version where the lands are muted - and 'unimportant'. However, so far, this is what I have. I thought I would share, because quite frankly I'm a little proud of it! This took me most of today to work on.

[gbmoore]

I am somewhat stuck on page 7 with the elevation base. I opted to use difference clouds to get the base down for the elevation, but I cannot tweak it, each time I do it just gives me a perfect circle. I assume my brush size is too big but even making it a small, low opacity brush I still cannot replicate results.

Ok past the first problem, now I cannot for the life of me get my rivers to show.

How did you get this to work for you? I'm having similar issues. No matter what I do I can't seem to get any elevation.

[Joshua]

How did you get this to work for you? I'm having similar issues. No matter what I do I can't seem to get any elevation.

In addition to the low opacity, choose a brush (or tweak a brush) with a very soft edge. The first row of brushes have hard edges, but see where the numbers start over again? That first "restart" is the soft edge section.

[Baxder]

Incredible! I have had a homebrew world that has spent years in pitiful penciled mediocrity as I've dreamed of coming across someone who could turn it into something respectable. In the meantime I've gained PS experience, but never had to use it creatively like this, so couldn't put the pieces together to do so. Now I find this, read it, and realize I can do it! I've begun already, and will be putting up a WIP....wherever they go. I hope the idea of using a hand-drawn, scanned map as a land mass basis will be helpful.

All I did was scan the fore-mentioned map, trace the coastlines and fill in the inland bodies of water with a small black brush (on another layer, of course), then fill the oceans black with the paint bucket. Make that the background layer for the "Clouds/Threshold" set, and tweak the clouds layer opacity to taste. I went with 60-ish%. After some cleaning up, it broke up the coast nicely, filled the oceans with various, surprisingly geologically sound archipelligos, and added a few inland lakes for my consideration. That's as far as I've got so far, having to restart the process twice for various failures on my part to pay attention to some important details that really messed things up later that I couldn't figure out how to fix.

I'm gratly encouraged by seeing other's work here. Razcor...a-ma-zing! I absolutely love your ocean floor and river deltas. And kat, your ocean does indeed look impressive. I love the paw!

Does anyone have an idea for making large plateaus, like mongolia-style? I could also use help making a few smaller, yet still very large ridges, and several small but very tall rock spires.

Thanks! I'm sure my stay will be short-lived, but I'd appreciate any help you guys can give me, and I'll try to contribute things I figure out along the way.

[Baxder]

Sorry for the double post; one should be gone soon.

Anyways, here's my WIP thread. I ran into a little trouble painting in the ocean elevations, (p.5 of the tutorial), but even with that issue I'm really happy with it so far! Please let me know what you think!

EDIT: I mention in my WIP thread the trouble I was having with the "Ocean Elevation" layer. As I was trying to figure it out I thought there had to be an easier way, so I re-arranged a couple of the ocean layers and played with bevel/emboss effects and opacities until I liked what I saw. Check out the attachment for how I re-stacked the layers. I won't go into details unless someone asks me to.

[niittaaja]

cant wait to try and make my own maps

[sigkate]

Thank you! I am looking forward to using this to create my ACKS campaign maps!

[Joe Smith]

Okay - i have restarted the tut about 4 times and i am finally getting the hang of it. This is how far i have gotten. i tried putting in mountain ranges but they just didnt make sense so im going to try again tomorrow!

[raddue]

Alright, so for the life of me I cannot figure out how to properly get rivers to show up using this method. Even with switching my brush to 100% opacity, 100% flow, 3 pixels and 100% hardness and following all of the other instructions to the letter, they do not draw. What they are seemingly doing is filling in the water layers, even though I have the Land layer selected. What I mean is that it's doing is creating land bridges in water instead of rivers in land, if that makes sense. I have tried switching the colors around and nothing changes.

Help? I'm using CS6.