That is an awesome looking map! I like the way that it looks sort of like an overhead picture, but at the same time still has a hand painted artistic feel to it.
That is an awesome looking map! I like the way that it looks sort of like an overhead picture, but at the same time still has a hand painted artistic feel to it.
Sorry to post so late.
I really appreciate the comments, it really helps, I'm only satisfied with these effects if it looks good to others, as I can't really go on my own opinion.
What has been going on:
Well I started to write the tutorial and I ran into a ridiculous problem. A part of the water that I thought was simple to recreate and didn't really matter to get specifically the same again turned out to be the key component to making the entire thing look good. This was the underwater texture. For some reason, It appears as if I had merged some multiply effect adding layer onto it as well, making it even harder to remember what was created how. There are a lot of reasons why the texture is so important. with too complex of a texture the water looks really noisy and un-smooth, while water should be smooth in these areas. Another reason is the color of the water greatly affects the feeling. Having some areas with too much of a color variety too fast makes it look like somebody spilled food coloring into the Caribbean.
Yet another reason why the texture is so important, this is the biggest one, I realized that the texture worked -with- the ocean depth.
(the ocean depth is created by the original render-clouds that were thresholded to create the land mask. The original clouds are copied, and turned to multiply or some other darkening effect, and applied to the underwater texture. This creates a very realistic depth effect (more than any glow could possibly do) Cause areas farther away from land tended to be darker in the original clouds (hence why they didn't turn into land during the threshold) hopefully that didn't go over your head. If it did, don't worry, it span around my head many times before it poked me in the eye.
Back to the texture part. The areas that were darker with the depth affect, had -more- texture to it! the concentration of the black stuff on the seafloor became higher in the deeper parts, and there was less in the shallower parts.
So yet, I lost the method to creating this amazing texture.
So I have spent more time trying to figure out how I did that texture again than I had to make this entire map.
but I'm pleased to announce
I found one of the main steps again!
Due to the shape of the texture I had constantly assumed I had used filter-render-fibers. I spent hours trying to use this to no avail. And so of course when once again, I'm just fiddling around, I find it again.
There are more steps that I will learn soon, it'll be easy from here, What I have learned so far is that It started with the original cloud layer, and simply used poster edges on it! poster edges with a high threshold, its like a 3, 1, 9 or something for the values, but yea.
So yea once I get that done and replicated on a test run, I'll start writing the ridiculously complicated yet very easy step-by-step tutorial.
Oh you poor soul! I've done that so many times with photoshop. Create a great effect with loads of fiddling and then sit there wondering how I did it.
What version of photoshop are you using??
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