First gimp-made map - "Ankae : the southern kingdoms - "

[riffman]

Hello, this is my first digital map made with the gimp, following Roba's tutorial. It's the reproduction of a hand drawn map, and it still need some works .
This region is a kind of Mediterranean one, with early medieval civilisations in the North, and more Byzantine or persian ones in the south.

every comments and advices are welcome...

[Karro]

All in all, a worthy effort. You can see the RobA tutorial influence, but with a good dose of your own style. The main weakness, IMO, is the mountains (also the most difficult part to get right, also IMHO). The first issue I notice with your mountains is that their color is the exact same as the background color of the map layers below the bumpmap. I think I know why you did that (with some of the mountains overlapping into desert regions, and the like), but they might look better if there was some sort of mountain-color layer with a gradient that fades out into the surrounding landscape towards the edge.

[riffman]

Thanks for the advice, i will try to follow it. I will also try to make the mountains look higher, with more pikes. And I've just found out that i forgot one kingdom in the legend ...

[torstan]

Now that you've got this style down I'd have a look through the tutorials for all the other mountain threads. There's quite a few... It's definitely worth doing and you've clearly got RobA's tutorial more or less worked out with this example. Good work, and welcome.

[ravells]

It's looking good, but I Karro is right about the mountains, they look like they're floating over the land. Have a look at the post in my sig about mountain boundries which may (or may not!) be of help. It also seems to me that you've got an effect where the land is standing proud of the sea, probably because of the perspective cloud effect and the fact that it's apparent that the cloud effect continues behind the landmass and comes out of the other side...another sea texture maybe?

Great work so far though!

[arsheesh]

Great work so far Riffman. What I liked most about this map was the shape of the land masses, and their position within the overall composition of the map-very attractive. Aside from the mountains the only slight infelicity (in my opinion) was the font used to designate your territories and civilizations. It seems to me that this font is a bit block-like, and just slight bit unclear. With so many great fonts out there to choose from I would recommend reconsidering the current choice. However this may just turn out to be a difference in taste, so if others feel differently about this matter they should speak up about it. Otherwise I liked your map, and I'll be keeping an eye on it as it progresses. By the way, here's a good link if your interested in checking out alternative fonts:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...y-Fantasy-Maps

Cheers,

-Arsheesh

[Steel General]

Great start...looking forward to the finished product.

[su_liam]

I think putting a soft hillshade over the prevailing local coloration would be an effective way of showing hills as opposed to mountains. For that, I would go with a somewhat less pronounced and shiny lighting effect. The billowy rounded shape of your(riffman's) noise is perfect for suggesting hills IMHO. For higher mountains, I'd alter the background color to suggest a treeline and possibly alpine glaciation. I'd use a much more ridged or "peaky(?)" noise for the hillshade on mountains. If you're not too concerned with creating an HF(my Achilles Heel), you could paint in shading to better represent the high ridgelines of mountain ranges. I think the amount and shininess of your current shading would be about right for true mountains.

[riffman]

Thanks for the compliments and the advices ! I'll send you the next version when it's ready...

[riffman]

Here's a ne version of Ankae : i have worked on the mountains, give more texture to the lowlands, and change the fonts...there is still some things to work on (i will try other fonts and an other sea texure), but it start looking like i wanted it to be...