WIP World Map

[lokiie1984]

WIP map.png

This all started by my desire to figure out river flow. Then it evolved into mountains. Now I'm just having fun playing with it.

I have been using the Simple Mountain tutorial to do the mountains. And boy is that is a pain to figure out. I think they are getting there though. Later once i have them all in place i want to use the same method to try and dig lakes too.

Now of only my coast line wasn't so hideous lol. I also have no idea how to color them, but i figure that i can learn later.

[lokiie1984]

Update: map land no color.jpgmap land color.jpgUntitled.jpg

Got the mountains finished, some of them may need to be redone now that i understand more about the method used to make them. So far its been pretty fun to do. Cept that it makes my wrists hurt lol.

The second picture is my land type lay out. Followed by a guide explaining what each color represents. I would like to try and adapt the mountain making process to be used with the desert and other land types, but im not sure if i want to do it with the forests. But before all that, i think i would like to try to do it for the ocean area.

[lokiie1984]

map land2.png

Update number 2. Been playing around with Wilbur, which makes some neat islands, but its not working as well for the main continent. Might try breaking it up into small blocks and then use gimp to put them together. Also looking into other programs to use, cc3 might be nice. Cept it seems to work at pretty low dpi settings. Not sure if that can be changed.

What is the preferred style for world maps? fractal or something else? Kind of thinking about trying to use wilbur for the world map so its fractal and then breaking it up into regions and either using http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...hallenged.html with gimp or maybe buying cc3.

[lokiie1984]

Update 3 Landmap2.jpg

I need to try and recolor parts and add rivers plus some islands. But it's getting there, been fun trying to find programs to do what i want. Now i just have to figure out how to blend it all together so it doesn't look like i just slapped a bunch of objects on top of other objects.

[Allerion]

Update number 2 looks good, but can't see update number 3 properly.

[lokiie1984]

Should be fixed now. The two main mountains didn't come out as well as i had hoped, plus the coloring kind looks like i slapped some paint onto rocks.

The mountains don't look like mountains to me, more like cooled lava trails.

Might be worth going back to the original style of mountain that i used and then making them fairly large to fit the land mass.

[lokiie1984]

So after figuring out where everything needed to go and not really liking what i had, i figured i would redo the map and do it right this time.

I have been following a mix of Roba's tutorial, Ascension's atlas tutorial, and Arsheesh's eriond tutorial. This is the heightmap i have so far.

world HMd.jpg

It still needs some cleaning but its not to bad. I ended up having to throw a layer of black over top of it while working because my screen is so bright i couldn't see anything. Then i broke it into pieces and let wilbur chew on each for a while. Threw them back together and let wilbur do it again for a few passes to smooth out the whole.

Over all I'm sure it could be better but my creativity is only matched by my laziness.

[arsheesh]

Looking better. Looks like you have a bit of a white glow out in the ocean surrounding the main continent, and a few other land masses though. How do you plan to color the map?

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[lokiie1984]

I used your gradients but i have been blending my own colors in where i feel they need a boost. On your temperate gradient, the brown really came out looking bad on my map. (probably because i set the bump map depth too high.) The parts of the mountain that would have been brown ended up really grainy. I might have to give it another go in Wilbur and try and erode down some of the noise. My issue is it looks good in the desert, but not so good on the mountains.

[arsheesh]

Ah, I see. I was thinking that if you used the gradient map method you may run into a bit of a continuity issue. The reason is that in your height map the mountain ranges (and the land surrounding them) in the north of your main continent have a very high elevation by comparison with the mountains to the south, or the island to the west. As a result the mountains in lower elevated areas will not have the same color scheme as those in the higher altitude areas. Perhaps that was what you were going for though.