Fanatsy World Map - Final Stage

[bandersnatch]

I love the painterly look of the ocean !

thanks, i think i´m pretty happy about the style too. Just need to replicate it '

Yes, but it looks like the depths are sticking out rather than in. I think that the lighting is subtly off. The northwest side of both the mountains and the depths are in light, with shadows to the southeast. One should be opposite. Or am I hallucinating?

Ah yes, thank you, you´re right, the lighting was kind of confusing, i used the relief kind filter in the filter gallery partly and it lightened up one side of the map and it looked kind of weird so i turned it arround, that was wrong oviosly.
Well, i just realised i am not using any procjetion, i did some research about that already, and I am on a tutorial about wilbut too now so i´ll rework it completly from scratch, except for the shapes.

Hm you´re might right about the rivers, but the map should be as near to a photo of the terrain as possible, and since the Planet wont be that big this should be kind of possible.
I´m thinking about how to do it the best way for my needs.
I thought about creating the raw world map with the shapes, the climate, tectonics etc... for understanding of whats going on.
Then adding the Ocean, since i should do that before i have forgotten how everything is done in photoshop again.

After thats finished i could make a seperated file for every country, and work on the terrain this way.
I calculated it, the resolution needs to be pretty high, so i can not do that in the world view... my laptop is struggling already. ^^
The rivers still wont be realisticly "small" but in an accaptable range i think.

I´ll start with the shapes, and the right projection this night, and see how far i'll come with the climate etc.
I´ll also document the steps i do, since i recognized its not that easy to replicate them.
I have already opened like 50 tabs in Firefox and several PDF Files. :-D

See you then.

/edit i thought about that again and i´ll rather make every continents terrain seperated, than every country.

[acrosome]

Speaking as a fellow neophyte, yes, you can easily get sucked into the technical side of this mapping stuff (as contrasted with the artistic side). The Wikipedia page on map projections is actually very good. And then you'll get sucked into climatology where, again, the Wikipedia page on Koppen climates is pretty good, though it may not be terribly applicable to you in such a fantastical setting. And Trewartha, which is a modification of Koppen, is probably better. And then there are Holdridge life zones.

Sigh.

I'm quite a bit more of a science/worldbuilding fanboi rather than an artistic mapper, so that's the stuff I geek out about.

Have you considered making your map a small part of a larger Earth-sized world? Then, as long as you know where the lines of latitude are we can give great climate advice. For instance, if you don't want the permanent polar caps involved then make your map run from about 60N to 60S or something. But if your setting is as fantastical as it sounds then the climate gurus here are apt to be less helpful.

Wilbur is awesome, especially for freeware, but it's functionality grew sort of organically rather than being designed from the ground up so some of it has very odd interfaces. Luckily the dev stops by here a lot (Waldronate). He answers questions in the software forum very diligently.