WIP: Forests

[Green-Pilgrim]

lake-dun-650.png

Have you ever had one of those maps that started off so clear and easy in your head and then, for some unknown reason, you slam head-first into the brick wall of "It's not working"?

Yeah - that's me with this map.

As you can see it's a fairly easy map. I'm just illustrating an inland lake with a major river coming in from the north and a minor river heading out of it to the south. There will be a few settlements around it which I will indicate with some tower icons I used in a previous map.

Here's my problem(s):

1. I hate forests now. Caves were so much easier. I could just throw a black layer on, darken it, throw in some highlights and some texture and voila; dirt & rock. Forests, however, never seem to look right. For most of my map work they are simply expressed with "Blobby masses of dark green surrounded with a black border". This is, essentially, my way of expressing the idea of a dense forest (with a lighter green layer around it to show the less dense forests). There HAS to be a better way.

2. Labeling. I've been reading up on the forums and even found a tutorial from Torstan (his name be praised) about how to add a 'halo' effect behind the letters to pull them off the page. I totally love the look but my problem is positioning. In the above map you'll see that I have one river label on the river itself, and the other is next to it because the text is too large to fit within the boundaries.

Request:

Anyone have any handy tutorials or tips for how to render forests without going all three-dimensional, isomorphic and such? I just need a way to render 'dense' forest. I think I've gotten the hang of water and rock (for dungeons least) so I assume that there's got to be a similar technique for making 'green blobby thing' look like woods.

Any pointers for label positioning?

Thanks!
-GP

[Diamond]

Have you ever had one of those maps that started off so clear and easy in your head and then, for some unknown reason, you slam head-first into the brick wall of "It's not working"?

All the f&!*%ing time...

What software are you using? On most of the vector and raster-based programs, you can arc and warp text to make it fit better. My suggestion on the Red River would be to shrink the text a bit and give it a slight path or arc that would let it fit in there without touching the banks. I'd also give the other river's name a bit of an arc as well, so they match aesthetically.

I do have a comment about the rivers themselves: Why is there a big river entering the lake, but only a small one exiting? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

As for forests... can't help ya.

[Raptori]

I've never attempted anything like that so normally I wouldn't be able to help at all here, but I saw these two tutorials a few days ago and thought they were pretty good:

On the style and rendering of trees
How to colour quick trees for RPG maps

I think style number 1 from the first tutorial used as a repeating texture over the top of what you've got now might look nice, plus the end result of the second tutorial looks awesome so maybe you could do that!

[Green-Pilgrim]

I'm on Gimp.

You do raise a good point about the size of the rivers. The water flows from north (top) to the south (bottom) and I should reverse the sizes or at least make the Red River larger - which will fix the labeling problem.

Thanks!

-GP

[kirkspencer]

Something like this? (only do it as layers, not directly to the map, so you can fix overspray and other oopses.)

lake-dun-650-2.png

If so, I did it in Gimp. Used the default bristles 01, brush, size 25, jitter on at 3.0. I overlayed with the green from the grass, a 63943f medium green, a light pass with the dark green you have already in the woods, and finished with a very light pass of b09433 light brown.