Edrasta

[Rwexler]

Hello!

I am working on the world Edrasta for several months now. The following pictures show the results I could achieve so far.
I mainly worked on the informational base, just visually creating what is absolutely necessary to show the different terrains of the world.
But I also tried my luck with wilbur to not just make nice mountains, but create realistic rivers.
Since Wilbur does not show biomes, though, I need to merge my both works together so that I have a map that combines both the topographic beauty and shows the biomes.
One could say I want to go for a satellite map style, which would be nice but is not true. My ambitions are not that high right now. But still.... I want to beautify the map, so here is what I did so far:

The grey physical map:
Farbprojekt.jpg
This is the grayscaled result of wilburs work, combined with the waterlayer which I put in because I disliked the just gray plains of nothing^^
I'd like to recreate the ocean floor lateron though. (It just consists of sketches I needed for biome placing)

The biome map:
Terrain.jpg
This is the plain biome map. I failed to create my own colourpalette, so I used the one that came with the map application of minecraft "AMIDST"

The legend for the biome map:
biom Farben.png
And this is the colourpalette I used as a picture. All rights to this colourpalette go to the creators of AMIDST

The physical and biome maps merged:
Physisch+Biom.jpg
Here is the result I got when I blured the biome map a bit and made it an overlay onto the gray physical map. It kinda looks nice but is nowhere near the endresult I want to have.

I also tried to mix it with satelite textures but got no usable result at all. So do you have any clues for me right now? I really could use some fresh ideas^^

EDIT: I am also open for complete new ideas for mapstyles. With my material I have kinda set in stone what is where. I just need something to visualize it. I am open to try out different stuff.
I used Photoshop CS6 btw.