Cool map Ascension. I like your rivers and the artistry.
One criticism if I may, well as a terrain head, I'm biased towards depiction of terrain, but you could improve your map by doing some erosion on it.
This is something I tried. I wanted the erosion to flow along the rivers I'd drawn on the map.
Create a selection mask of your hand drawn rivers.
Load terrain in Wilbur.
Load selection mask.
Apply a filter to incise along the river beds.
Run erosion.
Erosion should now pick up on the river beds. Rivers will flow along them. What's more all tributaries running into the rivers will give you lots of extra rivers for free, or just visually knit the terrain together more naturally should you not want to add them on the map. You can save out the rivers texture and use that as a selection mask. Sometimes erosion can alter coastlines too much. But you can save out terrain, separate to the original uneroded terrain, and then combine them with a blending mask in Photoshop or Gimp in such a way that you don't have any erosion creating havoc in your lowlands.You could even combine the river selection with those two mask to get more control over where the erosion goes.
Another approach is to do thing the opposite way round. Get your terrain and run the erosion. That will tell you where the rivers are naturally forming. Draw your major rivers in such away that they connect more naturally with how the land is flowing. Incise the rivers, run the erosion. You can get the best of both worlds of a map the way YOU want it to flow, and all the extra work that erosion can do for you without you spending eons drawing it.
monks
I've tried doing erosion and I always get these long straight rivers, I mean perfectly straight for long spans. It's most likely a problem with how I do a height map, which is to say totally amateur and probably wrong. I do need to figure it out, though, so thanks for reminding me.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Did you look at Joe's (Waldronate) tut on the Wilbur downloads page? It's dead easy. He adds a say 5% of noise between basin fills. With 0% noise, yes I got the straight rivers too, but with 0.5% noise, the rivers were more natural. 5% may be too much, but as I say, you can discard the noise after you have your river texture created, just revert back to your uneroded original. A little bit of random (unstructured) noise is ok imo. I tend to apply filters with my rivers selection masking out the river beds so as not to disturb existing river beds.
Yeah, I've done all of the tuts there just to feel my way around the program. I never remember the steps so anytime I try to do it I just hit my bookmarks.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
This is amazing, the style of it is exactly what I would do if I knew how.
I would love to see a how to tutorial for this.
Well done, i like the colors that were used!
nice graohics, love that!
Lovely map but the text details are quite hard to read, particularly zoomed out. I guess it depends what size you'd eventually use it, but for a screen-sized image it's not easy to see detail.
This is fantastic
Your choice of colors, texture and city layout is intriguing. Very well detailed. I think a great compliment to the regional map would be some close up views of slected cities.
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