Drachewelt - WIP

[bambua]

* The coastal shape looks good to me, except it is visibly constrained by the size of the rectangle you started with. If you expanded the document size to include a whole lot of ocean around the edges, anybody could still guess with a high degree of accuracy how big the original document was, since on all sides you have land ending right on or close to the edge of your document.

* Is what you've shown the whole world?
If so, and it's supposed to be a round world, you'll generally want a surface 2X as wide as it is tall, so you can easily wrap in around a sphere.

At this point it's only one portion of the world, similar to our world western hemisphere. I'm leaving the rest of it open for when I do other things.

[bambua]

So I took some advice that was posted here, changed the content orientation a bit and spread it out to the whole world map. It's a bit earlier in the process than the first post was but just wanted to see if there was any feedback on this shape change.

[jwbjerk]

It looks good flat.

Have you considered how this will look wrapped around a sphere? The northern and southern most bits get noticeably distorted.

EDIT: i've wanted an easy explanation of how to check for polar distortion before, so i through together a quick tutorial of my method, here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...p-in-the-Round

Please forgive the promotion of my own tutorial, but i haven't found another explanation of how to do this.

[bambua]

I'll give this a try, thanks!

It looks good flat.

Have you considered how this will look wrapped around a sphere? The northern and southern most bits get noticeably distorted.

EDIT: i've wanted an easy explanation of how to check for polar distortion before, so i through together a quick tutorial of my method, here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...p-in-the-Round

Please forgive the promotion of my own tutorial, but i haven't found another explanation of how to do this.

[bambua]

Tossed them into sketchup and saw how distorted it got, made a few changes and added the poles in. Now time to get to the real map making

Thanks for the input JWB, appreciated.

[alizarine]

If you have PS CS2+ (maybe CS +, not sure) you can map an image around a 3d sphere - that way you don't even have to leave PS at all. I do like where this is going except the ice caps are a bit distorted - that isn't too hard to fix, tho'. Looking forward to some more detail, even if you do have to reduce the size to upload!

- Alizarine

[jwbjerk]

bambua: It's fun to see your world in 3d for the first time isn't it?

If you have PS CS2+ (maybe CS +, not sure) you can map an image around a 3d sphere - that way you don't even have to leave PS at all.

There is Filter>Distort>Sphereize but that's no good for looking at the poles. Your perspective is always looking straight at the equator, and it distorts the polar edges differently, so it's no good at seeing how your map would actually look wrapped around a sphere.

Photoshop CS 3 and 4 EXTENDED, have some 3d features, that i'm not familiar with since i didn't pay extra for the extended version.

[bambua]

Newest work in progress shot, finished mountains on all of the continents and have most of the major rivers done in the central western continent. Having a lot of fun with this one.

[bambua]

Closeup of a region where I've added in the forest, I made a custom brush and painted it in with just a real low opacity and a little bit of bevel. I'm having a little bit of trouble with placing the forest over mountain areas right now as it's bleeding out all of the terrain, still working on that

[Sadist]

First off,
GREAT looking map bambua! looks like your making a lot of headway too. can't wait to see it finished!

It looks good flat.

Have you considered how this will look wrapped around a sphere? The northern and southern most bits get noticeably distorted.

EDIT: i've wanted an easy explanation of how to check for polar distortion before, so i through together a quick tutorial of my method, here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...p-in-the-Round

Please forgive the promotion of my own tutorial, but i haven't found another explanation of how to do this.

The other easy way is to open it up in Google Earth ( I love Google) I like it because you can load up smaller images like cities and things and zoom down in on them just like our planet
If you have GE just go to the Add button on the toolbar, go down to Image Overlay, pick the file you want and stretch and size to fit, looks like the same result as Sketchup, but I'm familiar with GE so, there ya go,
can you overlay multiple images in sketchup? I'll have to take a look.