Making elemnt changes less abrupt, how do?

[Akaizhar]

You are a life saver. I'll be doing some editing tonight, and I'll give you guys some updates in the next few days.

[ravells]

There is a link to a tutorial about this in my sig as well!

[Hai-Etlik]

It seems to me the problem might not be how hard the edges are, so much as the shapes of the features. Plenty of maps mark features with sharp, discrete symbols; it's easier to interpret than fuzzy blur. Consider these two shapes:

terain-shapes.png

The edges of the second one are just as sharp, but it it looks a lot more like something you'd expect to see on a map.

Here's a real life example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50...om=13&layers=M

[Akaizhar]

Good idea sir. Also, what is everyones average pixel per inch on their maps? I have mine set to 300, which may be way too high (resulting in slow load times/edit times). Should I drop it down?

[Hai-Etlik]

My maps are vector images so I only need to pick a resolution when I rasterize them, in which case it depends on what I plan to use the image for. I usually use the resolution of one of my monitors (101 or 96 DPI) for images to be displayed on a screen. For printing I use 300 or 600 for laser printers, 360 or 720 for inkjet.

Resolution by itself doesn't affect the size of the file or computation required. It's the logical dimensions that affect that. Resolution is just a little note attached to the file indicating how big the image should be/was in real life. It does play a role if you specify the size of your image in physical units though. 2000 px x 2000 px is the same regardless of resolution. 10 cm x 10 cm is not.

[Akaizhar]

Resolution Fixed. Forests, swamps and most things fixed. I have two main problems now...

How do you depict mountains?

How do you depict hilly terrain/badlands?

Here's an example of various features and how I implemented them.

example.jpg

The light grey with bumps in the top right middle would be what I would like to replace as my hills/badlands (it looks like crap)

[Lukc]

When printing, app. 600 dpi is good for hard black line art, 300 dpi is enough for masses of colour like photos and other things. On screen the dpi is a bit irrelevant, it's the pixels that matter (well, in combination with monitor size and how much detail you can jam in).

I usually do a lot of my somewhat more "realistic" mapps with texture brushes and lots of painting at low opacity, then a separate overlay layer to depict elevations and such.

[Midgardsormr]

The intended size and viewing distance also influence how high a resolution you want. A poster-sized map is usually okay at 150 dpi, or even 120, because the viewer isn't usually looking at it as closely as they would a page-sized map. At 600 dpi you're getting into the realm of art prints, even bordering on gallery quality for some things.

However, it's always possible to reduce the resolution and rarely possible to increase it, so I generally work at a resolution much higher than my intended end use. As high as is practical given hardware and tool limitations.

I really like the way your mountains look right now. For your hilly terrain, see if you can replicate what you've got going on with the foothills and maybe change the color to something between the mountain and desert colors.

[Jaxilon]

Also, just for the record I would refer you back to jzfrazierjr's posts above about layer masks. You just have no idea how slick those are until you understand them. It has helped me a lot especially when transitioning from say mountains to plains. I use a low opacity brush on the layer mask and just fade it out to perfection.

[Akaizhar]

Also, just for the record I would refer you back to jzfrazierjr's posts above about layer masks. You just have no idea how slick those are until you understand them. It has helped me a lot especially when transitioning from say mountains to plains. I use a low opacity brush on the layer mask and just fade it out to perfection.

I don't quite understand how to use a layer mask to be honest. I can create them and but I'm not sure what to do after that point.