Eastern Realms

[Seretur]

This is the third map I made with GIMP, using RobA's tutorial. With the other two, I didn't even attempt to do any stylistic things myself, so they look almost exactly like the map he made for the tutorial. This is the first one I started using minor adjustments to his techniques with. I got bored with English, so forgive the poor German. It still looks very similar, but it's different enough that I think it qualifies as a Work in Progress.

Feedback would be very helpful.

[hohum]

I think it looks pretty good. The texture over the whole thing is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure what you were going for. Right now I'm all about different kinds of paper textures. If you are worried about your German just type stuff into Google translate, it's not too horrible. One thing that I always struggled with in this tutorial is the hard edges on things, particularly the mountains and forests. Play around with noise, blur and feathering on your masks to get a result you like. It would also be nice to see a larger image to get a better look at the detail. Pretty darn good for 3rd map ever.

[Seretur]

The texture is a bump map of the parchment texture I used as the border. However, I'm playing around with it a little, as it seems more like a painting texture than old paper at the moment

[Seretur]

Tweaked the bump map a little, and figured out how to get the other type of mountains working. Looking better, but could still use some work. Any suggestions?

[Ascension]

All I can really say is make it bigger and put more stuff in Other than that, it looks perfect to the tut. As you do more maps you'll learn new things and a year from now you'll come back to this and redo it Everyone does. But for now, good job.

[Seretur]

Thanks. The mountains are bothering me a little, but I can't figure out why. I suppose I'll find a better way to do them eventually.

[Gidde]

They might be bothering you because the edges are so parallel. Try putting some spurs and odd shapes in; erosion usually makes jagged edges.

[Ascension]

That long solid ridgeline is kind of a killer when using a big bevel to make mtn slopes. The only way I know to fix that is to use a low opacity eraser of some kind of goofy shape and just keep sticking holes in until the ridgeline becomes more like peaks.

[Seretur]

Yeah, the tutorial had it pretty good. Glad to know I didn't do something wrong.

I've added a scale/compass rose. I'm probably going to leave it how it is now, unless someone else notices something I need to fix.

As to the size: this map was just supposed to be for testing how particular things looked, i.e. the parchment, rose, etc. So I didn't really need a large map, and a smaller one is easier to work with.

[tilt]

looking really good - nice textures - nice little map ... the mountain ridge could use to be broken here and there and the forests are a little shiny, but I like the overall look
perhaps you should draw the border out a bit more? .. anyway, have some rep for posting, you are now well on the way to spending all your time mapping