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.
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.Originally Posted by gbmoore
Yes, I'm colorblind. But my pink fields and orange forests are avant garde!!
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.
Last edited by Baxder; 04-04-2012 at 03:35 PM.
cant wait to try and make my own maps
Thank you!
Thank you! I am looking forward to using this to create my ACKS campaign maps!
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!
Tried it. Worked well for me.
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.
Last edited by raddue; 06-15-2012 at 03:51 AM. Reason: m r gud speeler
It's been a while since I did this one, but I think the problem is that you are on the land layer. You need to be on the land layers layer mask. It sounds like you are stroking the land layer, which would add more land rather than stroking the layer mask, which would remove land. Try clicking on the layer mask and then stroke the path. I think that will fix your problem.
Man, this was awesome. I managed to replicate something similar, but I couldn't get a few of the steps to work just right, but I am satisfied with what came out. The predominant issue I ran into was that I was reworking an already existing map outline that I stole from a larger world map I made a long time ago, so I basically couldn't use the initial Clouds/Difference Clouds technique. I also just used the magic wand tool for the rivers instead of the pen tool. At any rate, thank you for such an awesome tutorial!
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