My first try at worldbuilding

[Troedel]

Hi there,

After going through countless tutorials without ever realy trying ( stupid... ) I decided to get my feet wet with an atlas style map. It´s an up to date unnamed world, the coastline existed like forever and was first created by afriend of mine with no scale and no RPG in mind. I tweaked it and gave mountains to it. I tried to mage up the rivers out of an DEM finetuned in Wilbur but it didnt worked out like I thought. after a few hours I just decided to go on instead of stagnating endlessly. So I present...my first worldmap. Tear it apart

[Aval Penworth]

So far I really like what you have done. It has a fairly authentic satelite feel.

If you are looking for CC, I do notice that there are some rivers making very sharp turns, and some very straight stretches of coast.

[Troedel]

I started out with using clods and difference clouds to produce a heightmap and rendered it. It looked nice but there where no good lookingriver beds around. So I gave Wilbur a shot and applied the incise flow and tweaked the elevation a bit. But I couldn´t stamp out all the artifacts left by the cloud operation.Perhaps that is the reason for the river problem. I´ve got to give this a second try on a much smaller scale. The coast will be watched for a second approach. For now I´ll keep going.

[tilt]

nice start... the colors are perhaps a little strong, and I'd move the scale to a corner, but great start. Way to many rivers to check, but it looks like you've got the flow down, didn't find any violations in cursory scanning

[Lathorien]

Try this, colour the water black, and the land 50% grey, then use the Burn/Dodge tool to lighten strips, draw a white ridge with ridges comming out. This will build you a black-white heightscale to use in wilbur, but instead of random clouds you get moutain ridges where you want them. Dont worry about detail, just need to rough it in. After Percipitation, Incise Flow (blur 1, 2 if massive map), Incise Flow (blur 1), Incise Flow (blur 0 is smaller map), then percipitation again twice. (thats my wilbur standard) Wilbur will do alot of work/detail. After i have the wilbured relief, i render it with out rivers (like you did) path some black rivers in the right place (following the contures in your relief), then slap that black river down on your unrendered relief. Once all the rivers are black and on the relief layer, rerender your new relief layer. This will cut channels for the rivers.

[Troedel]

@Lathorien

Looked at your maps and will give it a try, as above mentioned on a smaller scale than my map. I made coffe inbetween steps. Lots of coffe. THX for the advice.

[Steel General]

Looks like a good start...

[hohum]

Honestly I think that you did a really good job, it all looks relatively believable. I did not look too closely. As far as the colors go, it looks like you exported the color output from wilbur into gimp. Try exporting a grayscale heightmap from wilbur and coloring/bumpmapping to taste ala Torq's tutorial.

[Troedel]

Actualy I copied the colors used in the wilbur shader to the texture for the greyscale hightmap. It´s not an exported colored picture, I just got used to the colors starring at them for what felt like hours. Colours have been changed. Colorintensity was taken out but the change isn´t great enough right now to justify a new update on the map. I changed the ocean too because I thought the outer shine was to strong and the border to the deep see too aprupt ( spelling? ) Is there a tuturial around how to make a broken threefold coastline around ( the rings around the islands but with breaks in it )? I´ll try to do some more work tomorrow, until then thanks for the comments.

[tilt]

there probably is a tut - but a quick way would be select landmasses (or ocean and invert) - expand selection by x-pixes - new layer - stroke ... expand again etc