Very Nice! it's gorgeous. VERY nice job on the symbols, it's very clear as to what I'm looking at in terms of place markers.
Not to sound nitpicky (as someone else pointed out, the devil is in the details) but as a constructive comment.. I've seen others point out, and noticed on most maps that borders along rivers tend to follow the river itself, there's a few spots where the borders overlap and cross back and forth along the rivers. Most of them look fine, but down near the swamp there's a few crossovers, and along the Cael'Bril border, for examples.
Of course, if they're still meant to do that, that's all good. And if not intentional, I completely understand how hard it can be to go back and fix that sort of thing (did a few myself, lol)
All in all, the map made me comment out loud, and that's a good thing!
My Map Portfolio
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Unless otherwise stated, all my work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
GD's the CC3 city master and he's got plenty of disciples for that. One day I'll have to get CC3 and try his tut myself cuz his towns are great and his cities are superb.
As for this, I'm still lovin it.
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
Yes, the river borders are a bit choppy on some of the rivers. Wherever you see one of these, you can see my inner frustration (lol). I wasn't 100% pleased with it myself, but, as long as the borders touch in the right spots, it shouldn't be too bad of a problem. I only plan on using this one for a small campaign group, so they will just have to deal with it.
What I did for my maps with river borders was use the river layer to cut out the country borders, if you follow what I mean.. I'm taking a quick research break right now or I'd post details. When I'm ready to take a serious break I'll check back in on this and see what I can do for detailed explanations if someone else doesn't beat me to it, or you get iton your own
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
I think I know what you mean, adding the river selection to the border selection, then separating countries that way. I will take a look at my file when I get home, but I think the rivers layer may already be merged down with the terrain layer. (Maybe not, though)
Then it's a matter of seeing if I can get the glow to update without too much of a hassle. I will take a look into it.
Well it looks like your rivers are single colour, no gradients along them, you it should be easy to colour select them and get a new layer back from it.
The border glow should take care of itself as a layer style.. Hopefully you kept a copy of the landmasses with no effects on it in case you need to copy anything and paste it back in (learned that one the hard way)
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
I know I haven't been around in a while, but I am in the process of fixing up this map after long last. Been extremely busy lately. But, I am mainly fixing the borders and rivers, added a legend, and alot of other stuff. Will post tonight or tomorrow morning when I get it fixed!
The (probably final) version of the map. Let me know if you notice anything... strange?
I widened out the borders around rivers so they wouldn't overlap the rivers and would be more prominent of a terrain feature. So, borders widen out a little when coming up against a river on purpose.
Edit: To fix my rivers, I actually went through with the eraser tool in Photoshop and traced them, with all countries filled in a single layer (so it would erase from both sides evenly). The borders may be a little wide for some people's tastes, but I really like how they turned out. I actually modified the glow to be stronger from Ascension's tutorial, as I wanted them to be more prominent.
And, of course, added a legend on the bottom left, which was not in the original remake.
Last edited by kittrellbj; 08-05-2010 at 09:21 PM. Reason: Add More Words!
Borders look fine to me; that's actually a really good idea, leaving some space on both banks of the rivers like that.
And putting 'snapshots' of the terrain types in the legend is genius! Repped.