The Burning Archipelago

[theleast]

Thanks for the kind words!

This is pretty beautiful, rep worthy i woud say. Looks very realistic - satelite view. I would love to know more how you painted it an made those nice lighting effects

For the painting I used a combination of custom brushes, real geographic information (I stole some of New Zealand's mountains), and various blending modes.

For the lighting effect I took the grey-scale height map and used it as a displacement (aka height) map in Cinema 4D, that I then applied to a flat plane. This turned the plane into a 3D extrusion, where lighter shades of grey were higher. I then placed two lights in the scene: One was a faint blue area light to represent ambient light from the sky, the other was a slightly yellow infinite light at a low angle to represent the sun. I then rendered the plane out from directly overhead using an illumination pass which only outputs lighting information. Finally, I took this lighting pass and dropped it above the colour-map in photoshop, setting the layer mode to Overlay.

Most of what I've done is derived from various tutorials that I've found here, but if people want to know more about my specific techniques I'd be happy to make a tutorial or two of my own.

Since you asked for feedback, i'd say the only thing that bugs me a bit are the "particles" flying around the edge of the title parchment background. Also the labels are a bit too big in my view (crossing the islands' coasts) and are somewhat overwhelming the beautiful landmasses. In that regard, i can just highly recommend having a look at Eduard Imhof's: "Positioning Names on Maps", wich is a wonderful resource for placing labels. I'm sure your next map will look even more breathtaking... Keep up the awesome work!

Oh yeah, I forgot to clean up the parchment mask, hence the particles. Next time! And I'll definitely check out that guide, it looks very useful. Thanks!