Well, I could comment, but you seem to have the things I'd suggest on your to-do list already But yeah... the diagonal strikes texture is just a bit too visible, I think, especially on the forests.
Love to see more
Well, I could comment, but you seem to have the things I'd suggest on your to-do list already But yeah... the diagonal strikes texture is just a bit too visible, I think, especially on the forests.
Love to see more
I have (more or less) finished the elevations of the mountains, now I have to make the transition between the individual heights more smooth.
at the moment I apply a average blur and get some structure back with the smudge (?) tool.
Does anybody know a trick to make a gradient as an interpolation of the layers? Just applying a strong blurr gets rid of all details in the heightmap, so I have to do it all by hand.
Hope I you understand my question, thanks
Craith
normal people creep me out
Update:
I tweaked some textures / icons and finished the heightmaps für the mountains. I'm not yet satisfied with the textures/colors, but I think it's getting better.
Added roads, those are only temporary and will change somewhere in the future
Real Life is catching up on me and I hardly get any work done on the map, should get better in a few weeks (hopefully)
Again, please comment / critique / guide me on my quest to improve this map.
normal people creep me out
First, I really like the colors on this map. Also, I think the forests and the water look very nice. Good work with the tutorials, and very good first map. Consider yourself repped.
I do have to say that I liked the first version of the mountains better, but in both maps they were not my favs. In both, I might like a more gradual fade between the mountains and the grass... right now its a little abrupt. In the new one, the tops look like they were shorn off. Did you use the emboss tool or did you do these differently?
Also, the border on the upper left are (in green) is really hard to see. Maybe change it to white, orange, or purple?
Last edited by msa; 05-15-2009 at 08:15 AM.
Thank you very much for your feedback!
For the mountains I used a crude handdrawn map with the most important mountains, then I created heigthlines using those information, and finally I used the smudge tool and some blurr to smooth it out and create ridges.
I think I will have to experiment a bit with the bumpiness and sharpen the peaks.
Concerning the fade between mountains and grass, you gave me the idea to add some hills around it (would also be logical) I'll see when I get to it, thank you very much!
The border colors are chosen because of the individual flag-colors of the countries, but I guess I should just chose some that look good. The top-left country uses grey and green in its banner.
The colors on the map are 90% from RobA's great Gimp Tutorial, so I cant take credit here
normal people creep me out
Did you use emboss afterwards? The first map looks like you used emboss to convert the hand drawn topo map to one with shadows. I could be wrong... my eyes aren't that good... but the later one doesn't look embossed.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, the tutorial that discusses how to do mountains with gimp is probably much more lucid than I am.
I'd say that the mtns are a great start. The forests, tho, look like they have more height than the mtns do. This is bcuz the forests have more variation between dark and light areas. If you could carry that over to the mtns they'd looks pretty nice and deeper. Put a layer of 50% gray on top, set it to overlay, then take out an airbrush and use black to add depth to the valleys, white to add height. You'll have to play around with the opacity settings to determine what you like as well as the size of the airbrush tip.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps