Stormfall (Continent)

[blattacker]

Hey all, long time lurker, first time poster, as well as first map. I'm working on making a satellite photo-style version of a hand drawn map I made for a D&D campaign. I'm currently using World Machine for the heightmap and coloring, and then doing a small bit of post processing in Photoshop. I'm a long way from finished, but I'm at a point now where I feel comfortable asking for critiques on style as well as how believable the map is. For reference, I've included the original hand-drawn map, the first attempt at digitizing it, as well as my current progress on the sat-map style one.

Here's the original map that I drew, I was going for a sort of Tolkien style to it, but I feel like I really missed the mark on that (which is what prompted me to try digitizing it)
handDrawn.png

This next one was the first kinda foray into Photoshop with the map, I changed a lot of things, some of it due to it not being super realistic (the coast-to-coast river, for example), and other things got changed simply because I don't have a scanner, and taking a photo with a camera and tracing it only goes so far.
digitized_001.png

This final image is the pure texture map (with some fake lighting introduced to try to raise up the mountains a little bit) out of World Machine. The things I still want to do is add in some different biomes, there are some desert areas planned where the rain shadow from the mountains would be, the northern side of the continent is planned to be more arid/canyon style terrain, and I also want to add in denser forested areas, as well as bringing the lakes back in.
satMap.png

Thanks for taking the time to look at this, and I'm looking forward to hearing what people think, and what ideas they may have!

[Kellerica]

Nice progress so far! The second one is definitely the kind of map I personally like the best. The colours in the third one are a bit too saturated for my taste, but you've got a nice heightmap there and the rivers are looking very realistic! I'm not really familiar with World Machine, so it's interesting to see what kinf of results you get from it.

Nice first map posts, glad you decided to end your lurking days! Welcome to the Guild, may you feel at home at these halls!

[blattacker]

Thank you so much! Honestly, I think my biggest issue with the second map stems from the fact that I just used a brush for the trees whereas everything else is hand drawn, so there is a bit of a style disparity there. I've been considering going back in and redrawing all of the trees by hand, but that will be a bit of an undertaking, and I've been distracted with the sat-map version for awhile.

I do agree on the super saturated colors, that's another thing I'm planning on fixing. To be completely honest, the coloring in that right now is just default World Machine shaders. Once I finish out the terrain, I'm planning on going in and really fine-tuning the colors, so hopefully they look a bit better next go-around! I can't take full credit for the rivers, World Machine has a really useful (and powerful) way of generating rivers realistically based on terrain height and drainage areas, so there were very few settings to mess with there. I've been using World Machine for several years now, though I've never quite used it in this way, so it's been an interesting journey trying to get good 2D results from a program that is more geared to a 3D workflow!

Thanks again for taking the time to comment! I'm sure I'm gonna enjoy my time here, I've already learned so much just from the resources I've found here, as well as taking some inspiration from other maps I've seen here!

[blattacker]

After working at it a bit more, I've added in the lakes, started generally mapping the different biomes, and got to work on actually making the texture map. I'm really happy with my current progress on it, and I feel like I may be in the final hours of this project! Let me know what you all think so far!

test_002-webshare.png

[Kellerica]

Those mountains look amazing!

[blattacker]

Thanks! Again, World Machine needs most of the credit here, the ability to run erosion simulations to get natural looking mountains, and then having separately exported flow, deposition, and wear masks from that erosion makes coloring in a natural way crazy easy! I honestly think that without the flow lines apparent, this map wouldn't look nearly as good. I want to blur out the oceans a bit, I don't think you should see that much detail underwater, but luckily that shouldn't be too hard. After that, it'll just be refining the color, feathering biome masks so the transitions aren't as harsh (and maybe adding separate transition color layers to help that a bit), and I think I'll be finished! At least until someone points out something that could/should be changed and I agree ahaha!

[blattacker]

I have reached a point where I think I've finished this map as well as I can with my current skillset. I could go on tweaking the texturing for hours or days, but at this point, I'm changing things by a fraction of a percent at a time, so I think I'm gonna call it here! Having finished the satellite map view of the map, I'm excited to work now on bringing the scout map version up to a similar level of quality! In any case, here is the finished product, let me know what you all think!

final001-webshare.png

I've changed some of the colors around, and have also expanded the desert biome to get rid of the weird grassland band in the transition between the mountains and the desert. I also added some slight (but in my opinion, significant) color variation in the base textures, though some parts, to my eye, seem a bit overdone.

[blattacker]

In a bout of “I’ll never finish this, because I want to work on it forever!” I have also made an atlas style map where the colors are simply based on elevation and nothing else, using the cartographic colors provided in a link in one of Artiflexian's more recent videos on atlas-style maps. As with the previous iteration of this map, the entire thing was done in World Machine, which I personally think is an incredibly powerful, and incredibly underrated/underused program for making maps! If anyone is interested, I've been using World Machine for many years now, and can start making text and/or video tutorials on how to use it for this specific workflow (It can be a bit weird, considering it wasn't exactly designed for 2D/Top-down work). In any case, here's the results, let me know what everyone thinks!

atlasStyle001.png

Honestly, my biggest gripe with these maps as they currently stand is more an issue with the 2D nature. When viewing in 3D, you see that those two rivers towards the north-eastern side of the continent are these really spectacular waterfalls that, even without things like proper lighting and textures (specifically on the water) and foliage populations, are really quite gorgeous, to the point where I may start rendering out some 3D scenes using this map. I may post them here, unless I'm told not to!