A world without name

[farvardin]

I've begun to design a World some years ago, based on a story I'm writing.
There is no name to the area in the attached pictures, but it's planned too.

It was first drawn on paper, scanned, converted to inkscape and exported to gimp. I'm using mouse and tablet to draw layers on it.

The first version is the physical map, the second one the symbolical map. They are still lacking details.

I find some fantastic inspirations from the maps on this forum, so I hope to get new ideas for my map.

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Sigurd]

Very pretty. I like the physical layer! Is that all brush and artistic impression or did you use a mechanical process?

Your map seems like a very evocative patch of land for stories and adventures. I'm curious to see it develop.

Have some reputation. You're in a rare club with more reputation than posts .

[farvardin]

thank you for your welcome and comments.

For the physical map, if I remember well, I've made the mountains with inkscape, separating the levels with different colors.

Then I exported the map to gimp and started to use the smudge tool to melt the parts together.

I've used a gaussian blur to finish mixing.

I've processed like this several times with several layers and different filters, which I merged together after a while (because the file was getting pretty huge, around 40 Mb)

[farvardin]

I hadn't worked on this map until recently.

I've begun to add some roads and towns, and to define some names for them. I've also added a few more vegetations and darkened the mountains.

I hope to finish to populate it soon. The letters will have a shade of white around them so it will be more readable.

[Ascension]

2 minor things: the ocean looks purple and the roads should wiggle and meander. Otherwise, I think it looks great.

[adunakhor]

Really nice work! I also think that roads should not be straight; it would have more charm .

And that’s true this map seems very evocative of a story. I love also your physical map

[farvardin]

Hello,

after a quite long hiatus, I'm back with some news.
First, I took into account some of your advices, in particular about the ugly straight lines. So I made them more natural.

Then, even if I still want to work more on this map, I'd like to include in the creation more details such as towns and buildings. So I've begun to rethink the overall map generation. I'm a contributor to openstreetmap, and I like the program called JOSM, which allow to create and edit streets, roads, areas... This way I can zoom in and out without being limited by the resolution of the bitmap. I can also design the map, and alter the rendering afterwards (using a CSS-like syntax).

It was also difficult to find a program to convert the map without creating a complex openstreetmap-like database. I found ceyx being the perfect tool for this.

Here is the result (the version below):

carte17.jpg

It doesn't look as good as the first version at the moment, but I hope to improve it in the near future.

Just for fun, a more modern looking version, using the default CSS (some items are missing):

monde_carte17b.jpg

I'll post the full sources I used if some people are interested.

[cantab]

I've heard of JOSM and OpenStreetMap, but never done anything with them. This is looking good though.

I disagree with the previously-expressed sentiment against straight roads. The Romans built theirs arrow-straight, so if you're looking for a similar civilization you might want straight roads at least in lowland areas.

[farvardin]

Hello,

I haven't worked much on this topic, but I made a video recently, showing some possibilities with openstreetmap tools such as glosm and josm :




I made also a zoomable map with the leaflet js library: http://anamnese.online.fr/carte/leaflet.html
It's possible to add custom markers with pop-up informations. It's at an early stage at the moment.