Exploring techniques [wip]

[kjdavies]

Hi All,

I've been exploring techniques for a number of map elements (water, shallows, forests, mountains, etc.) and figured it was time to start actually putting together a map.

I've scribbled together a start, a guideline for roughly what I'm aiming for. White is land, very pale bluish-green is not. Dark brown lines are mountains (one line is smallish, two lines is bigger); arrows across them indicate the long side of the ridge (I've got some tectonic action going on here), arrowheads along ridge indicate slip, the red line indicates volcanic activity along the fault line. Rivers are blue, forests are green, desert is yellow. After that, not much is decided.

(and yes, modeled very loosely on Europe/Asia/Africa).


Keith


kjdwip-20091203-001.png

[Davros01]

To be truthful, I find it a bit strange. Probably, because I don't know enough about it to really appreciate it. is this intended as a close to final product??

I do look forward to its evolution and comments from the rest of the community to see how it develops.

Marc

[kjdavies]

Nope, *just* getting started. The (approximate) landforms are probably where they'll end up, I've identified where some mountain ranges will be, that I probably want some rivers *here* and *here*, and so on.

This is the "I just drew the outline on a piece of paper" step. I've got this up so we can see how close my final product is to the original.

K.

[kjdavies]

[anyone who says that renovating your kitchen in December is a good idea needs to have his reality adjusted. I've been at it two weeks and we're only getting *close* to done... but it's looking pretty awesome, I'll admit. --kjd]

Okay, now that I've finally found a bit of free time, I've put some more into this map. I've gone through and done the landforms, each major area ('england', 'japan', 'continent', 'australia', and 'archipelago' -- that one was a significant pain) done on a separate work layer because they have different tweaks done.

I've attached a shot of the landforms (the black and white picture) and have overlaid the original scribbles (using grain merge) to compare, see how good the match is.

The main continent is a little more jaggy than I was aiming for, but I can live with it for now. I'll adjust it later if I need to -- part of the benefit of the semi-random techniques I'm using is that they can provide detail I can't be bothered to in my scribbles.

Mountains next, I think.

Keith

[kjdavies]

Bah. Did get somewhere farther with this, but lost it in the shuffle when replacing my workstation ("eh, don't need to worry about ~/documents, I've got everything in SVN...").

I'll be starting a new project sometime soon. Probably a smaller one, I found this one to be a little too big to be easy to work with. Start with smaller projects to practice techniques, only build the bigger one when I've got the techniques down.

Keith