Lothgar WIP

[arsheesh]

"Formerly part of the Avenian Empire, Lothgar won its independence following the events of the Avenian Civil War. Lothgar is ruled by a powerful Autarch who is treated as a demigod. Much of the Lothgarian Empire is located in arid lands. However the fertile Kellan river delta has both sustained the empire, and made it wealthy through trade. In fact, Lothgar is one of the major producers of coffee and spices in Eriond."

Lothgar is a powerful autacrchic nation located in the far south of the known world of Eriond (a world that is I have created for use in my homebrew campaign setting). The map was created using GIMP and Wilbur. This is my second attempt at using Wilbur to help augment terrain. I experimented with a variety of different kinds of cloud patterns for the height map. I began with a Black and White relief map that had been copied from a portion of my earlier map of Eriond. Next came the cloud patterns. Generating terrain with clouds isn't normally difficult, but since this map is meant to model my preexisting map, the challenge was to find a GIMP cloud pattern suitable to manipulation. I then modified the cloud patterns with the paintbrush tool, and played around with various layer settings to generate the initial GIMP height map. This went into Wilbur where I generated the final Height Map. Then I used a Gradient Map to color the height Map, and a couple of Bump Maps to bring out the height. Right now I think the terrain is just about done and I'm going to start adding place names. As always comments and critiques are welcome.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

Edit: I couldn't fit in all the attachments into one post, so I'll upload the finalized terrain map in the following post.

[arsheesh]

And here is the finalized terrain map.

[Yandor]

thats pretty cool man, with wilbur are you just using Jezelf's tutorial (or at least for the most part?)

[arsheesh]

Thanks Yandor. I began with Jezelf's tutorial, and found it helpful. But as a GIMP user there were some things that didn't translate over so well from his PS tutorial. So I've just been sort of playing around with things for a bit, learning as I go.

[jtougas]

Awesome as usual. The terrain is spot on and makes me think arid steppes.

[arsheesh]

Thanks JT, but actually I wasn't completely satisfied with this version. So I went ahead and tried a different type of clouds so I could get more typical looking mountains. Don't know if this is much of an improvement or not, but here's the new version (on the left). I've included the old version (right) for the sake of comparison.

[Steel General]

Looking good so far Arsheesh.

[illustranaut]

Looking Sweet Arsheesh, you can almost taste the dust looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

[jtougas]

The new mountains look more "mountainy" (that CAN'T possibly be a word. ) but the first version looks more like steppes or giant dunes. Either way they both work .

[arsheesh]

Took a break from this and am just now returning to it. I've added a title and a border. Up next, I'm going to attempt to label the map using Inkscape, which will be interesting since I've never really used the program before).

Cheers,
-Arsheesh