WIP - Veia

[Gidde]

After roughly a week of trying (and failing) to reproduce the ocean from my Belgariad map, I've finally come up with something I can at least live with on this one (and recorded the steps to get to it).

This project is a result of an epiphany I had in regards to my seemingly endless writer's block ... I was writing about a world where I didn't want to be, full of the same stuff that makes me angry about this one. As an escapist reader, this is probably opposite of what I ought to be doing. So this is the world map (yep, it's small, the world itself is roughly Mars-sized and this is the only known grouping of land on it) for my new project: a world to which I'd actually want to go, and a novel centered around the things I love, not the things I hate. Hopefully it will flow a little better. At least I've written some words on it, which is much better than I can say for the other one over the last year and a half.

Anyway, what I have so far are just ocean and basic landforms with base color/texture on them. I've also started on the heightmap for the land and I'm posting that up too; this is the technique I used for the Belgariad mountains. Since all of the landforms in this world are volcanic, formed in a single massive (and divine) flurry of volcanic events, I'm using it for the general height of the land as well. We'll see how it goes.

[Ascension]

Looks good and the rivers look great.

[Diamond]

I hope sincerely that you plan on doing a tutorial for those mountains sometime soon; the ones on the Belgariad map were abso-frackin-lutely amazing.

I like the layout of this; simple but with more than enough nooks and crannies for interesting stuff. One thing I noticed about the seas on this map, as opposed to the Belgariad one, is that there's a dark ring surrounging the lighter ring on the coasts, that gives the appearance of a continental shelf. I don't know if this was intentional or not; if it was, to me it looks too uniform.

[Gidde]

Thanks guys!

@Diamond: That's actually why I posted up this step. Before this it's just painting in vague areas of terrain. My plan is to post up intermediate steps on the mountains to make sure they're as good as I can get them before I make that tut up. There is indeed a subtle continental shelf under the surface waves, but maybe it does look too uniform at that; I'll have to go back into the sea layers and tweak that.

[Diamond]

@Diamond: That's actually why I posted up this step. Before this it's just painting in vague areas of terrain. My plan is to post up intermediate steps on the mountains to make sure they're as good as I can get them before I make that tut up.

Sweetness!

[Gidde]

Hmmm ... so after much time and much pain, the result of that experiment looks completely horrible. Back to the drawing board. In the meantime, adding unnecessary levels of complexity as always, I've whipped up a BlueMarble-type equirectangular map to use as the basis for a rendered globe, which I'm planning to use as the centerpiece for the compass rose for this map if I can ever get the style right.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial on making a realistic cloud-cover map? I've got some basic clouds on here, but I'm not incredibly happy with them.

[Diamond]

Ascencion's planet-creation tutorial has a method of making a pretty cool-looking cloud cover. If I recall, it's just a basic Clouds filter with the black erased, then spherize it to your globe.

[Gidde]

lol, that's pretty much what I did. PS's tools might be better for the purpose than Gimp's, though.

[ravells]

Looks really good, Gidde although at that distance real clouds tend to be a bit more spiral shaped, IIRC. Rather than making them I would go to Nasa's website and just extract the clouds from a photo (but I'm just lazy that way!).