Veskar WIP

[arsheesh]

"Veskar remains one of the wildest and most dangerous realms within the civilized lands of Eriond. It’s seas are aswarm with scaled terrors, it’s hillsides are overrun with Giants, ancient dragons alight from its mountains and a terrible witch-queen lays siege upon the frozen borderlands. Yet perhaps the most deadly adversary is the extreme weather. Despite these trials, a society of sea-faring barbarians has managed to survive along the coastal regions of Veskar."

Hey Guys, been away from mapping for a spell but there's a chance I might be running another campaign in my homebrew campaign world so I thought I'd work on a map of the region we'd be gaming in. Veskar is the northwestern edge of civilization, and its northern borders extend into near arctic conditions.

I decided to go for a photo-realistic style for this map. I used both GIMP and Wilbur, and, as this is my first time using the latter, it took a fair amount of experimenting around with height maps and gradient maps before this WIP met with my satisfaction. Still, there are a few infelicities:

1. In coming up with my initial height map, I used the airbrush tool (rather than the paintbrush or dodge/burn tool) to adjust the gray-scale. However, when I zoomed in to 100% I found that the brush made circular patterns throughout the height map.
2. As the northern section of this map is located in sub-arctic conditions, I wanted to use a gradient (from white to green) to show the gradual change in biomes. However, the gradient didn't play nice with the gradient map I had already made to indicate elevation.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to remedy either one of these problems I'm all ears. As always, comments and critiques are welcome. Thanks guys.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Steel General]

I'd say it looks darn nice so far.

[arsheesh]

Thanks SG. OK, got a question for you guys out there. I'm working on forests now and at first I tried using my own forests tut which basically uses cut out cloud patterns for the main clumps of forest and individual trees to fill in the gaps. However, I also tried just creating whole forests out of individual trees (without the cloud patterns). I guess my question is, which style seems most suited to this map? I'm leaning towards just going with the individual tree-forests for this one, but I wanted to get a second opinion before I do so. Thanks.

[torstan]

I think that at this scale you need to deal with clumps of trees rather than individual trees. You'd never see an individual tree. I like the clumps - they look good.

[Ascension]

Theory and common sense dictate clumps. But of the two the first one looks more "right" to me because the second one looks like the trees are zoomed in to a regional level (bubbly looking).

[Katto]

Go for the clumps arsheesh and btw a very fine start!

[Steel General]

I'd go with the first version.

[arsheesh]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Ascension, I had a similar intuition about the clumps: the scaling just didn't feel right. Of course like Torstan pointed out, you wouldn't be able to see individual trees at the scale I'm using either. While this is certainly true, the individual trees in the first map could just as easily be seen as representing entire groves. In the end I decided to split the difference. I scaled down the clumps somewhat, adding individual trees to the forest borders. I also added a title to the map. Still working on figuring out a way to give the northern section an arctic look. As previously mentioned, I tried adding an arctic themed gradient but it didn't really work well with the gradient map that I am using. I may have an idea about that though. More to come.

[torstan]

Looking good. I'd suggest dialing back the weight of the shadows on the clumps of trees. At the moment they have heavy black shadows comparable to the shadows on your mountains. I'm guessing all the forests aren't also forested mountains?

[Eilathen]

Hey arsheesh,

Not much to add to the things the others said...but i wanted to compliment you on your Age of Legends link in your sig. I really like the style of the site and the pictures are awesome (can i ask where you got those very athmospheric pics you used for each country entrance?) ... i hope we will see more regional maps (only the first country has any entrances, all the other links go to the campaign map, is that correct?) .

Best,
E.