The Valley

[Ascension]

I might take the dark green ring off of the gradient for the mtns, the tan looks good but the dark green above that looks out of place. Or maybe swap the tan and dark green.

[Diamond]

I agree with Ascension r.e. the dark green ring - it looks odd. Other than that, awesome. As far as scale, that sounds workable. Just be careful with your river thickness.

[Radu Vlad]

It's getting better!
If i may suggest you something, i'd be great if u had some wide river bed in the middle of the map; winding and not too deep, but large windy rivers usually create some terraces where they bend (on the concavity shore), while sometimes making some cliffs on the other side, if the soil/rockbed is strong enough to allow it. This way, u will have a river course collecting all the water flowing from the mountains, and it will give the area a little bit more depth. Best bet: start it form the north-west corner, go through the middle where it should by pretty windy, and exit somewhere to the south.
Some more nitpicking: on the upper left side, theres a couple on peaks separated from the rst: just cool. But in the valley behind those, there are some riverbeds (smalll) that seem to drain nowhere - and thats weird. Depending on the inclination, u'd want to create another small river there, to collect those waters, and make it go round those peaks, left or right, and merge with the main river in the middle.
Also, on the west side there's an incipient valley betewwn 2 peaks,, that also has a small river basin but.. it goes nowhere, because the mountains rise again on the edge; not good. Make it a valley proper, this way u'll also make the 2 peaks/ranges more distinct.
Just my 2c, sorry if im being a nuisance

P.S. If u'll be getting really good with this, i'll hire you to make me some 3D maps based on my WIP when the time comes . Bet they'd be looking pretty neat.

[LonewandererD]

Okay

@Ascension and Diamond - The map is not going to be coloured like this in the final thing, this is just me playing around in the Gecontrol 2, the rest is going to be done similiar to my Dominion of Sorres style in Photoshop.

@Radu Vlad - I am going to have a river, several in fact but the main water feature is actually going to be a very large lake that takes up almost of the southwest of the map. The idea is that this place is deep in the mountains and the lake used to be a volcano that collaspe in on itself after erupting and then filled with water. The area still has some geothermal activity that leads to naturall hotsprings, the soil is quite good considered where the valley is and with mountains on all sides the valley is, or atleast was, a safe haven from the rest of the world.

-D-

[Ascension]

No worries, mate. You know what you're doing...we've trained you well young padawan. Heh.

[LonewandererD]

Okay, some progress, not entirely happy with it. They're nowhere near as good as Pasis' to be sure but its a start at least. I tried but I can't get my mountains to have the same solid "presense" that Pasis' mountains have. At least I got the general layout right, or I hope I did.

I've put in all the colours for the base land and the mountains. They may look a little wierd zoomed out so i suggest zooming in to see what I'm trying to get at. Will need to tinker a lot more with it but at the moment I'm going to experiment with getting rivers and forests to work on this map.

More to come soon.

-D-

[pasis]

LoneD you are doing far better than I when I started with GC2. One important thing to get the mountains look good is to make the grassland (or whatever you have in the base of the mountains) and forest to slither up the mountain side (I attached sample to show what I mean) You can also experiment with different mountain textures. Attached is the texture I used in my last map and you can easily get a different feeling by playing with hue and saturation.
Just keep on going and I'm sure it will be great.

[LonewandererD]

Thnks for the advice pasis, the mountains in that first pic look really solid, did you paint them at 100% opacity or did the whole low, med and high mountain layer approach?

-D-

[pasis]

Thnks for the advice pasis, the mountains in that first pic look really solid, did you paint them at 100% opacity or did the whole low, med and high mountain layer approach?

-D-

Yes I paint at 100% opacity and layer set to multiply. I used the low, med hig layer approach only in few problematic area.

[LonewandererD]

Some progress. Goota, I love experimenting with geocontrol now, it made placing rivers a little easier to do. On that note, I've thrown in the rivers, most of them anyway and what I do have still needs work, and the large lake the southwest. I also added an extra layer to the mountains to try and give them more depth and added an area of rocky ground between two of the mountains areas in the northeast. And now, a question. The river is generally 28 pixels wide, would a scale of 60 pixels = 1 mile be appropriate for that?

I'll continue to fiddle with everything as I place down some trees.

-D-