My first try at worldbuilding

[Lathorien]

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.

i use a gradient ala Ascension (like white, brown green) for a boreal area (or white, brown, dark green, light green, tan, and then revese for a global) but taking the colour right from Wilbur is good to, gives it that proffesional modern look. I like it, and as they said it is a very good map as it is, on thing you got better than me is the low land areas, i get more intence hills which is cool, but for fantasy maps where used to a lot "flat" space and your looks perfectly in the middle.

Good to see another good GIMP mapper!

http://lathorien.deviantart.com/#/d30lbjx
here is a newer example than the ones here, it shows the rivers cut in. (still improving the rivers)

i will also upload the pictures of the rough grayscale i made in 5 min by hand, and then what it looked like when it came out of wilbur to deviant art too ( i cant stand uploading and attaching files here anymore)

[Troedel]

First shot at text, color adjustment, and a quick compass rose, nothing fancy just to get a feel with paths. I´ll look for a nice border, too.

[Steel General]

Looks nice, I think I'd shorten the 'distance' of the drop shadows on the compass rose and text though.

[tilt]

I agree, pull it in closer - looking really good

[thomryng]

The terrain is just beautiful!

In addition to the drop shadow issue mentioned by Steel General and tilt, I'd take another look at the continental shelf. In some places the "glow" has the effect of making the nearby landmass look like it's levitating over the water, particularly in the south where the land is a sandier colour.

Just my two cents.

[Troedel]

I´ll fix the dropshadow issue and will tweak the compass itself a little bit. The font has got to be a little rougher, it´s too "nice". For the levetating thing you are right thomryng. I´ll try to darken the coastareas a bit to make a connection to the water, hope that solves it. THX for the advice, wouldn´t have seen it.

[Troedel]

I added a nice border ( as nice as it gets right now, it´s harder than it looks ) changed the compass to a less intesive expirience and forgot the dropshadow. It´s to late now to fix that. But it evolves.

[Redrobes]

The terrain looks great and very realistic. Theres a lack of any lakes or water in the lines showing where the rivers would run. Border looks great. No problem. Only thing I can see is that you might well have intended to write see but it might have been sea.

[geamon]

The open ocean water looks very pixelated with the gradients symbolizing the depth. You can easily apply a gaussian blur to this layer(s) and smooth it out and make it more uniform.

[Troedel]

So here´s another nightly build. I could not see the pixelation mentioned, perhaps it has got to do with jpg compression. Names are hard to come by and I read the pdf about placing names on maps ( it´s somewhere around here on the forum.. ) The neatlines have been tweaked a little bit, they are not true to the pixel but it will do I think. Tomorrow I will start to design the map symbols. The red in the scale bar was chosen as a contrast to the blues and greens of the map, I think I will do the symbols in a dark red too.
I looked at a satelite image of earth tonight and noticed that only the absolute biggest rivers and lakes show up in a kind of blue at a given distance. I´ve decided against going down that road as the river locations are clearly to identify. So I hope you have fun with this map. I´m looking forward to suggestions.