Really nice. Wanted to rep you, but I need to spread around some rep first...
Close on the heels of my last map, a friend asked me to work on another (seems these things are popular, who'da figured)
Once again, Ascension Atlas styled (eventually I may get tired of these and move on, but these just look so cool!), only this time with a twist.
I drew out the supercontinent first (based on an existing island i found, it seems easier to work with pre-existing), broke it up with some random lines (used a cracked sidewalk texture for inspiration) and got my friend to give me a bunch of random numbers to represent drift and rotation.
Based on where the continents collided, I added large mountain ranges, and smaller ones along the leading edge of the primary movement. And then I had fun with the gradients
Still a fairly young world, I figure, so the mountains haven't eroded a lot yet.
But then I looked at the ocean and figured I could do something to make it more interesting. So there's a few underwater features ready for exploration
Really nice. Wanted to rep you, but I need to spread around some rep first...
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Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
Really like the sub-water features. Any technique tips you will share?
A long time back I was trying to get a good way to make some underwater features but never got any great ideas...
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That looks really cool. Are the bathymetric (underwater elevations) mountains from pictures that were then grayscaled or are they beveled like the shelf? The ocean floor is as much of an interest to me as the rest of the world but most don't seem to like me doing it, they say it's distracting. I do it anyway and I'm glad to see you doing it too Good stuff, man.
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Craters!
Seriously, i got some good craters from the moon and mars, and played with them a bit. First I started with overlaying a fullsize texture map of Mars, stretched it out so the icecaps didn't show, played with the transparency so the clouds still showed through from the original layer underneath. Next layer was a texturemap I found of clouds to wrap around a globe (for rendering Earth), select range and deleted the black so I just had clouds, I forget what I did to that layer for lighting, I'll check later (the wife is yelling at me saying we need to go for dinner, heh).
Then I grabbed the neatest looking crater for the big one in the middle of the continent. I actually reused that one for the deapsea trenches as well, with judicious resizing, distorting, erasing, changing transparency, editing curves, and overlay.
Same with the other features, just grabbed what was neat, adjusted so the colour would fit, desaturated when necessary, and used Overlay.
Fun!
Oh, and almost forgot, I used a similar bevel to the Shelf layer on the earth-clouds layer, but no others.
Yeah, the underwater features here looks really awesome. The above-surface map looks good, too, mind but that's some great underwater topography (bathymetry, I guess )
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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
AGH!
I flattened the image out at one point so I could grab it as a single layer to work with in another file. And at some point the flattened version saved over top of the original and apparently I'd closed out the program in between so no chance of recovery- all those layers lost, and any editing to the underwater will need to be done directly on the only remaining layer
But at least I have a finished version, ready for the text layers! (and there's a backup PSD I'd made, but it was from before I did the ocean layer or rivers) There's been a few tweaks to get rid of some artifacts, added the rivers, and I redid the trenches in the lower left to bring the sharpness in detail back out, otherwise pretty much the same, not worth another upload just yet.
Won't help you now, but try to save to different files as the map is progressing. You can never lose much that way.
Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
I thought I had, I generally keep 2 backup files as I go, and never delete a layer if I can help it.
All I can think is that I forgot at some point
Ahwell, the important thing is that I remember the process - i can recreate it any time I want, if i really want to!
I try to stick with the 'Copy Visible' and 'New Layer from Visible' option in GIMP... I assume there is an equivalent in any similar application. That way I never have to actually merge any layers to get a temporary version with all the info.
Also, your map is beautiful. Repped!