Map of the Dawn Republic

[Phanues]

Hi guys - i only recently registered, so i thought i'd post a WIP for a fantasy map I've been working on for the last week or so.

The map is for the Dawn Republic, an area used in the Yogscast D&D stream, a Dungeons and Dragons series being played live on the Yogscast Twitch channel every Sundays from 5pm GMT.
If you enjoy watching people play tabletop games, or D&D in general i can highly recommend it, as it's a fun series to watch in my opinion.

The DM, Mark Humes had uploaded a basic map he whipped up for the viewers to his Twitter : LINK
Since the map was pretty basic, i figured i wanted to create something a bit more high spec.
I started out on creating an old looking parchment map, but i quickly scrapped it because i ended up making it in too low a resolution, and was not satisfied with having to use Photoshop brushes to detail towns/mountains/trees on the map, i wanted a more hand-drawn feel to it.

I've already spent quite some time on this, and while i did not keep track of all the things i did along the way, i did at least save out some separate stages of the process.

Progress collage :
vRSmaAN.png

1. First i created an alpha map, using the tried and tested method of rendering a layer of difference clouds, increasing the threshold and cutting out parts of the new shapes to use as coastline.
2. Next, i filled in the landmass and sea with a bunch of basic colors. I also stroked the coastline to give some preliminary definition where the water dropped off from shallow to deep.
3. The colors were a bit too bright to my liking so i subdued them a bit. Here you can also see my newly defined brush colors which i keep on a separate layer.
4. Still not being happy with the colors, i swapped things around. the lands to the right of where the mountain ridge is going to be is mostly grasslands, while the area off to the right is a desert biome, which is now reflected in the colors. i also added in some yellowish highlights along the coast to denote beach areas. I also created a swirling pattern on the sea layer to give the illusion of currents.
5. Here i added in a pretty basic bump map to lend the terrain some relief. I toyed around a bit with it in Wilbur, though since the rivers were already defined, there wasn't much i could do with those.
6. I started blending the colors for my landmass a lot more and bringing out some more saturation. i reduced the texture on the desert area, and blended it in with the grassland - keeping the highlights in places where the landscape is supposed to have some hills.

Where i'm currently at :
utdSPUZ.jpg

A lot of work has happened in between the last step of the collage and this picture - i created the mountains myself - i used a 1px brush to block in the general shapes on 3 separate layers - one layer for the base mountain shapes, one for the ridge running from peak to peak, and another layer for the secondary ridges that run down the mountain. I then selected each layer, made a work path out of it, and on a new layer used the stroke+simulate pressure technique to make the mountains appear more hand-drawn.

I also re-did the wave lines in the sea, for a more gradual change from shallow to deep water - also adding a repeating sine wave shape to the outer rim of it.

The forests are made by a liberal application of some splatter brushes, use of the Noise and Crystallize filters in Photoshop, after which i use a scattering maple leaf brush to generate dotted shapes and add some more Noise + Gaussian blur.
Wen i was satisfied with the basic shape, i added an inner shadow to simulate roundness in the canopy, a drop shadow off to the bottom and left, and on a new layer i selected the canopy shape and used a 2px stroke with a darker green color for a nice outline.
I then created some highlights in the trees by duplicating the layer, using the plastic filter effect and setting the new layer to exclusion on 70%fill and 40% opacity.

To do :

• Finishing the mountains, i'm currently in the progress of adding the final shadows and highlights.
• Defining hills - though the hilly areas are already somewhat defined through the bump map, i think i'll try and draw them in as well to see how that looks.
• Adding in locations. - I'm still contemplating on if i want to create icons for each location, or simply use simple representations like circles. i would prefer the former, but the latter is a lot simpler to do.
• [Optional] I'm still not completely sold on the forests as i have them now. A hand drawn forest might look better next to those mountains. it's not something that has a priority for me at the moment though.

Software used : Photoshop CS5
Image size : 4093 x 2647, 300 DPI (started out with 4100x2650, new size is after some cropping.)
Time spent so far : anywhere between 6-9 hours over the course of a week.

If any of you wishes to share their thoughts/critiques, that would be greatly appreciated.