Procedure to do a map like that?

[kaahen]

Hi,

I'm new, I'm happy to have found this web, I really like creating maps.

I would like to ask you for help to create one the most similar to the attached one. that it has been extracted from the gallery of www.wizards.com.

Could you please guide me in the way that the different elements are done more or less, I mean, Mountains: Clouds/Gaussian Blur, Grass: Clouds/Bump...
I am also very interested in the water, since I really like this cristal effect in the border.

On the other hand, could you tell me how to make a bump map in Photoshop as well as scaling Clouds or other effects in CS3?

Thanks in advance

[joão paulo]

Well, sitting on the tutorials forum for a broad collection explaining various ways to do this.

[kaahen]

The first thing I did was just checking some of the tutorials you mentioned, but I understand that the purpose of doing these tutorials is to make a map with the same style of the tutorial, so each tutorial is different.

I didn't mean to show me one tutorial for doing this one, but only some guides to work with, and try things on my own. After that I will follow for sure more tutorials, in fact I just followed 2 of them, but I have the impressión that I learning more procedures that I really need.

[joão paulo]

It is difficult to say, I do not particularly like to get stuck in techniques of others, I prefer to drive by my imagination.

[RobA]

-Grass looks like the sandstone texturizer filter.
-Mountains look painted.... try the "rising the mountains in photoshop" tutorial
-Forest looks like a dense noise inverted bumpmap
-Water looks like an inner glow, with some sort of ripple distortion filter.
-The rest is basic bevel effects

-Rob A>

[kaahen]

First, thanks for your aswer.

Sorry but I didn't find this sandstone you mentioned inside the texturizer filter in CS3. But I've been thinking that I can get it with 2 bumps maps, one based in clouds and the other with another bump texture or may be bumping noise?..., in 3d is quite simple using bumps, I'm sure in Photoshop has to be easy as well.

I also made a question in my first post about scaling clouds, since I think it could be used to make the mountains combined maybe with some noise...

By the way could you please tell me the way to make the bump map in photoshop, I've been checking with the channels but not sure exactly the way they work, or if you know a good tutorial to do it... I've been reading with bevel but is quite more complicated and harder to remember than with channels.

[Midgardsormr]

You've actually chosen two of the things that Photoshop doesn't do remarkably well and the Gimp does.

The only way to get clouds at different scales with Photoshop's standard filters is to render the clouds in a document with a different resolution, then resize them and paste them into your working document. For smaller clouds, use a larger document. There are some plug-ins that make much better clouds, though.

Bump maps can be utilized a couple of different ways. If you use the Lighting Effects filter, your bump map needs to be a channel. It takes some fiddling with the settings to get good results with the filter, and I often run it multiple times on a variety of different selections in order to get enough variation in my mountains.

You can also define the bump map as a pattern and use it in the texturize option under the bevel & emboss layer style.

Finally, you could use the Displace filter, which references a file external to your document for the bump map.

Each method will get different results, and the best image may well come from using two, or even all three, techniques in tandem.

edit: Concerning the sandstone: filter > texture > Texturizer.
In the drop down labeled "Texture:" there are four options: brick, burlap, canvas, and sandstone.

[kaahen]

Thanks very much for your answer, I have things clearer now. I did the bump map using the channel and the lighting effect. It looks good, but what happens when I want to make more than a bump with this method at the same layer, should I duplicate everytime the layer and add transparency?

Also thanks for this solution to scale clouds, I don't like it, but as you said is a way to do it, I knew that Gimp does it perfectly touching the parameters.

I finally located the sandstone, I also will check it.

[jfrazierjr]

Thanks very much for your answer, I have things clearer now. I did the bump map using the channel and the lighting effect. It looks good, but what happens when I want to make more than a bump with this method at the same layer, should I duplicate everytime the layer and add transparency?

I use GIMP and some of the processes are different of course, but I rarely add a bump map to a color layer for this exact reason. Typically, I create a layer of 50% grey set to overlay mode and then run the bump map on that layer against whatever noise layer. This allows multiple different bump maps to be chained together to get a specific effect.

[Ascension]

To me the mountains look like a granite pattern that was then bumped (layer of 50% gray set to overlay then use the dodge tool for brighter/higher spot and the burn tool for darker/lower spots) with some red airbrushing in places. The lake is, as RobA said, a distort filter with a lil extra bumping or plain old airbrushing. The forests look like a textured bevel or a lighting effects applied to many renditions of difference clouds with some rusty spots thrown in to break up the color. The grass looks like a lighting effects applied to some clouds with added noise and then inner beveled around the water or possibly bumped because there are some subtle hills. Looking at it some more the grass could just be a textured bevel as well...not sure what the pattern is but something like blurred blobs.