First Attempt

[Lucjan]

Following one of the tutorials here. Here's my first attempt at creating a relatively 3d map with Gimp. I think it's pretty decent for a first try, but I'll be playing with it and other maps quite a bit before I feel comfortable with a finished one.

I haven't placed any cities or roads as that part is still widely speculative and under construction. But this is the northwestern corner of one of my world's continents.

Any suggestions are welcome.

EDIT - Any suggestions on how to fix my horrible looking forests would be great!

[NeonKnight]

Ahhh, those are forests. I thought they were a different type of Hills. I like them for forested hills mind you.

[su_liam]

They are a good start on conifers. Would probably work at a much smaller scale. You're so close with that, I'd love to know how you got the noise so jagged. They would make delicious craggy mountains.

Instead of Clouds, I've been experimenting with Add Noise for forests. Start with a fairly small image. Add 3-15%(!) noise. Blur a little. Resize the image larger. Add more noise. A little more blur. Big up. Repeat to taste...

In greyscale, that can make a decent forest bumpmap. With gradient mapping it can also generate a good colormap.

[jfrazierjr]

One of the new people here displayed a technique I rather liked for forests. Basically, instead of using regular/turbulent noise for the bumpmap layer, he used plasma. I think it turned out great and I will be using the technique myself for future maps of this style. here is the link to the post: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2043

Joe

[Lucjan]

Wow, I definately like the plasma noise for the forests. I'll have to try that out. As for how I got the forests, which look like jagged mountains, to be so jagged...


Uuuhmm.

lol

I'll get back to you on that. I'm not quite sure how I did it myself. I think I messed up following the tutorial. I'll check up on that tomorrow after I give another map a run through and see if I can't recall what I did last time.

Right now it's 4am, and I need sleep. >.<

Check back in later though. :-)