Various early map attempts

[Zach]

So I just introduced myself a few days ago, but as I said I had been following tutorials on this site and making some random maps for a few months prior.
People expressed an interest in seeing them, so I will post them here because they are all "regional/world maps". This is basically a collection of maps I have made since last summer, or at least a review of my previous work.

- My first ones, two-color alpha maps, are pretty bland and don't look like much, so I'm not bothering with them.
- (Maps 4 and 5) I then made a few photorealistic maps from kind of random coastlines. At the time I was obsessed with Old Guy Gaming - Realistic Coastlines Revisited for creating coastlines (which is an excellent method).
- (Map 6) At the time, I was developing a fractal heightfield generator, and when it reached some level of completion I made a small test map to see what sort of map it could produce. That is the little green and blue map, and it was almost completely created randomly. I now generate all random terrain with this program.
- (Maps 9 and 10) Afterwards, I wrote some GIMP plugins to generate a contour map from a heightfield; there are two examples here.
- (Map 12) Recently I tried to make a old-style hand-drawn map. It was the first time I had actually tried to draw map objects like forests and rivers, and I spent a lot of time working out the right ways to draw them. When I drew lots of mountains all over the map and then realized that there was a better way to draw them, I gave up on the project.

I have started work on a new map, but it is a WIP and deserves its own thread.
Feel free to comment on these. However, I am probably not going to revisit/redo any of them.

Z

[Jalyha]

These are great!

I can't wait to see your wip

[rgcalsaverini]

Those look very good! I like you style experimentations!

[eternalsage]

Nice. I like. Definitely getting better with time. Are you working on anything in particular, or just little test projects?

[Zach]

I have a new map, also with a quasi-random coastline, that will go up as a WIP very soon. It might count as a "little test project" because it is not for a RPG or story or anything like that. But I am putting way more effort into it than I had put into these.

[Nathan]

What's the process to produce the contour map for heightfield ?
I like it.

[Zach]

Well, the heightfield image itself comes from my terrain generator, and it is just a greyscale PNG. But to produce the contour maps in GIMP, I wrote a contour line script-fu, which draws a single contour line. Then the full contour map script-fu just draws a bunch of contour lines. It would work with any greyscale image that represented a heightfield.

[eternalsage]

Hmm. I don't suppose you would be interested in uploading that script sonewhere would you?

Sent from my Samsung Centura using Tapatalk.

[Domino44]

those do look really nice! I really want you to start that WIP thread!

I really like your heightfield map.

[Zach]

I just learned that I can attach ZIP files, so look for a thread in the Tutorials/How-To section that will have them.