Unnamed Work-in-Progress, for now

[RazielKilsenhoek]

Hey everyone,

There's a map I've been working on for months, and I didn't want to start a thread and post a minor update every 3 weeks because it would get old, fast. But now I'm nearing the end of it and I think it's ready to be revealed. I made a black-white landmap with the Render Clouds -> Threshold method that is featured in several great tutorials on this site, and continued from there. I spent weeks trying to fill it with my usual mountain and town brushes, but I stumbled across the amazing Saderan tutorial. I'd never done a map style like that and decided to give it a shot, not knowing how addictive it would become. After struggling on the mountains for a while, here's my current WIP.

Map 4.6 Smaller.png

The image is half-size of the real thing because the png file was too large otherwise. Remaining details are rivers, town/city icons, city/area/ocean names, and some ship routes. I have a border and overlay ready.

Criticism welcome! I've put more hours into this map than any other so I want to make sure it comes out as good as possible.

[persona-non-sequitur]

It's looking great, Raz! Getting the mountains right can be a pain. Have you thought about adding a scale marker? Just something to indicate the size of the world, like | |100mi. I was having trouble with my own WIP but having a unit of measure helped - I realized I was making my mountains waaaaaay too big in relation to the rest of the map.

(BTW your name reminds me of one of my favorite games! )

[RazielKilsenhoek]

I'm hoping that would be one of the Legacy of Kain games, then And thanks for the feedback! I usually add a scale marker at the end but your comment made me realize it's actually a helpful tool while building the world itself. I think that's probably something I should do first, so I can edit mountains as needed before adding rivers and such.

[persona-non-sequitur]

I'm hoping that would be one of the Legacy of Kain games, then

It is! I love the Lok games!

It wasn't until I added a scale to my map that I realized all my mountain ranges were 2k+ miles long. I haven't gotten to adding rivers and lakes yet, but I'm probably going to freehand them in. I like the pen tool for control but I find when I use it that I get too orderly, and with freehand I'm a bit looser. I use a tablet, though, so it might be different if I used a mouse.

[RazielKilsenhoek]

I have a tablet as well but I always struggle with freehanding the whole river from start to finish in one movement. Tendons in my wrist are a bit bleh. I'll probably spend tonight and tomorrow after work on them though, see how they fill up the empty spots so I can see what else needs adding.

[Azélor]

The image is half-size of the real thing because the png file was too large otherwise.

If you use jpeg instead of png, you will lose a negligible amount in quality but it will reduce the size off the image a lot.

[RazielKilsenhoek]

If you use jpeg instead of png, you will lose a negligible amount in quality but it will reduce the size off the image a lot.

That's good to know, thanks. I thought JPEG's quality loss would be significant but I just tested it and you're right. Will upload next WIP update in JPEG.

[Azélor]

That's good to know, thanks. I thought JPEG's quality loss would be significant but I just tested it and you're right. Will upload next WIP update in JPEG.

That depends on the quantity you pick.

[RazielKilsenhoek]

Haven't put in a scale marker yet but I have it in my head. I've reduced the size of some of the mountains but kept a few of them pretty big. Also added a little crater that fits in to the backstory of the map. Saved in JPEG as suggested this time, couldn't really notice much quality loss.

Map 4.6.jpeg

How do most of you do your rivers? With the pen tool for added control, or do you just freehand it?

[RazielKilsenhoek]

Added some rivers. Didn't want to overdo it by putting them absolutely everywhere. I figure there's plenty of streams that wouldn't be visible at this scale, but the larger ones carrying the water away from the larger and (some of the) smaller mountains would be. Made them really thick before I re-did it with my tablet. Came out better than I thought it would, but I'm curious if this is too few.

Map 4.6.jpeg

Next up would be all the cities/towns/landmarks, and the roads. I'd have to make the roads pretty thin and subtle at this scale so I'm not sure how to do that yet.