New mapmaker with a conundrum...

[Ryan K]

I sort of had the same dilemma, and I guess my cheater's way out was using Fractal Terrains and spending a couple of hours scrolling through seed maps before finding the sort of sea/land configuration I was after, and then spending a few hours playing around with coastlines, mountains, rainfall and temperature to get the climates mostly right.

[hubbardmapworks]

your dilemna sounds like what i'm experimenting with now. i am using real-world GIS data, and then transforming it into fictional space with gimp.
you can load in country/continent polygons, then reshape them with the tools available in the GIS software.
then i paint over, re-surface, re-texturize until it looks nothing like the original landform...adding water bodies, new mountains, flora, etc in gimp.
still new to me though, working on some projects now, will post in future when possible.

[Preypacer]

Hi all..

Thanks for the replies

I'm currently taking a step back and thinking through more of the overall geography of the map so I can be better prepared when putting it together in GIMP. I'm actually considering another approach, perhaps, as a starting point.

I've seen some maps that seem to be derived from "texturing over" a heightmap and then touching up in Photoshop or something to that effect. This way you get a genuine 3D look to the map, but still with the custom map look...

I might try this approach... going to experiment with it a bit on some small test maps and see what the results are like. Perhaps I'll post them here if I think it might be something worthwhile to share.