New WIP by GW - Un-named Regional Map

[Greason Wolfe]

So I've been mostly absent these last few month dealing with family issues (my grandmother's declining health and eventual passing on July 1st) and haven't really had much time to work on maps, or anything creative, for that matter. Now that things have settled down, I've managed to get back to work on a new project based loosely on Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince/Dragon Star series with a smattering of The Witcher tossed in just to shake things up some. I haven't come up with a name for the project just yet, but I've worked out the basic map.

This preliminary render will probably end up being used as a reference with a goal of achieving something similar to what I accomplished with my Brewhome Challenge Map some months back ( http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...s-of-the-World ). I had thought, perhaps, to follow through with the Terragen rendering approach, but have been having a bit of difficulty blending the lower slopes into the flatter areas. It's possible that applying an Exponent via Wilbur may solve this problem, seeing as how most of the terrain building has been accomplished in Wilbur, but I'll have to work out a few selection masks just to make sure I don't lose too many mountains along the way.

In any event, here's what I have so far. I may need to be a little more aggressive with the rendering angle, but I'll have to wait to see how things work out once I've solved the blending problem.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Still experimenting with the pseudo-hand-drawn style (as rendered by Terragen) here, so not a major update other than to "finalize" the coastal waters, refine the shore line and add in some latitude/longitude lines. For the time being, I'm working with a flat surface (i.e. no elevation data) so that I can refine some of the other elements before launching into the actual terrain features.

My concern, at the moment, is the latitude/longitude lines. Something seems a bit off with them. The overall goal is to give a bit of a perspective feel to the map, and it seems to me that the longitude lines should be curved in some way, but my brain says that doesn't make sense. Since the overall area of the map should represent about 207025 square miles (455 by 455), the latitude and longitude lines currently represent about 1 degree each in terms of the globe. I'm planning this to be centered somewhere around 45 degrees north for a moderately temperate climate, so I'm not sure if the area in question would show much of a curve to the latitude lines. If anyone's got any ideas on this, I'm all ears.

GW

Bah! It's a good thing I'm wearing one of those "If you can read this shirt, I've fallen off my bar stool" shirts today. I meant the latitude lines not the longitude lines.