This is pretty much my favorite compliment ever, so thanks for thatOriginally Posted by Caenwyr
You're also 110% right about the framing. In an earlier version no land masses were split and all was happy, but then I got the urge to start messing with tectonics and new continents came about and... well you see where we ended up. Now that I've likely exhausted my appetite for major changes, I'm going to do exactly what you suggest and rotate the whole thing so that no major landmasses get split.
Only took >1 year, but I've finally taken a stab at a "satellite style" texture map. I have basically no idea what I'm doing and can only stare at this for so long before going slightly nutty, so figured I'd post my current WIP here to see what more discerning eyes think.
ox_sat.jpg ox_clim.png
I think it looks good, but the uniformity of the green is too consistent. There should be more areas of subtle variation even if the climate across the continent isn't that varied.
DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/turambar91
Cool to see our worlds are at similar stages! I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, but what I did for a "natural color" map was use a very high-resolution satellite image of Earth and sample the colors of areas with the same climates. After that it was lots of overlay brushwork and the smudge tool to make it look a bit more "natural", and playing with levels until I liked the color scheme.
Yeah, this was kind of my worry as well. I based the amount of variation on what there seemed to be in a similarly sized region of NA that has similar climates, but if it comes off as too uniform I can try to add in more medium frequency differences. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see what I can do
uniform.png
Your recent update may have been what motivated me to get my act together and finally finish this draft! I mostly built these textures from satellite images, but it was a bit of a challenge to get things to have a uniform and reasonable amount of "noisiness" and not look either too similar or too different in terms of color and high/low-lights. I never thought topography would be the easy part
Hi MrBragg,
I don't know what degree of realism you're aiming for, but in the past I've used Arsheesh's tutorial at http://https://www.cartographersguil...heesh+tutorial. You might have to tweak the gradients to produce more variation in colours, however, but overall I was rather satisfied with this method. Tiluchi's method will probably yield more realistic results, but I still recommend Arsheesh's just for comparison.
Looking forward to the final product!
Peter
Thanks Peter, I actually messed around with Arsheesh's method a long time ago and could never get results I was happy with. Others have gotten it to work really well, so the problem is clearly not with the method
For a second stab at this I took everyone's advice and tried to break up the monotonous expanses of single texture with more climate-appropriate variability. IMO it's an improvement, but as always I'd be very curious to hear others' thoughts and opinions.
ox_sat2.jpg
Very nice work! It looks excellent. Do you plan to add shadings on the seas to make the continent pop more?
Thanks Ilanthar! The oceans are definitely on a to-do list, somewhere...
In the meantime, I've taken a stab at another continent that has a bit more biome variance to see if the variation here looks any better.
southPole_sat3.jpg southPole_clim.png
Looking better with every post, MrBragg! One suggestion though: maybe use a lighter shade of green for the forests, alternating with a little yellow for the rain shadows, if you've defined them.
Other than that, the rendering looks gorgeous. The icecap on the southern tip of your continent looks very lifelike. Process, if you would share?
Peter
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