September Entry: The Broken Coast

[jfrazierjr]

Holy Cow! My Daughter went to bed early tonight! That means I can spend time and check out/comment on other works of art up here! YAY!

OK,

- I love the texture of the ocean but I think there is far too much glow around the islands. I say glow because it looks like they are glowing instead of it being a shore or sandbar. It just doesn't look natural to me.

Thanks. I actually think I will be doing a bit more playing with the texture to try to get something a bit less wavy. I was thinking the same thing about the bright parts and was thinking last night after I posted about toning that down a bit my by blurring more of my mid range blue color over top of the base light blue. Isn't it funny how sometimes you like something sooo damn much, and then the more you look after the next day, you really start to think "damn, that's messed up"?

- I like the detail of your swamp - it is very crisp and clear. I think it could use some hue adjustments along with lowering the saturation a bit. I think it is a bit too colorful to be a dangerous swamp. I think it could us a bit more dirtying up but perhaps you haven't gotten to that phase yet.

Well.. it's not supposed to be a swamp... it's a marsh (2 marshes actually), which is different. I will be adding a bit more of the base water (again, light blue) color (just a tad) and a tiny bit of darkish green in some spots to kind of mix up the colors a bit more. As for hue and saturation, I have NO idea what type of effects to be aiming for with either of those technique changes, so am not sure I can hit the nail on the head (so to speak) Anyway, thanks for the comments.

- The mountains are a nice texture but I have a secret hope that you increase the height in different parts of it - just to see how well you do it now that I struggled with my mountains for way too many hours.

Heh... well.. those are nothing like my final mountains will be. They were just a quick placeholder I put in to my mind could know where the elements go to some degree. I even said so in my post. If you want to get an idea of how I will be doing the mountains (I hope you like like them!), go here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...1&postcount=22. Note that the post in the link is NOT a completed version. I only did "parts" of the mountains in the picture up right to show a comparison difference. It has been a while, so I hope I don't have to much trouble remembering how to do that style of mountains.

[jfrazierjr]

Ok.. Got my mountain peaks done, and etched the coast. Note that the underlying stuff between the mountains (and on the south land mass) will be changing at some point.

[Steel General]

The mountains are quite nice, can't wait to see the next update.

[jezelf]

that's coming along really well. I like the mountains too. also the swamp area

[ravells]

Those mountains are fantastic! How did you do them? Great work!

[jfrazierjr]

Those mountains are fantastic! How did you do them? Great work!

Thanks,

It's a variation on RobA's mountain tutorial in GIMP (the video one). I have to admit that this probably takes about a good hour. I expect once someone has done it a few times, they can probably get it done in 20-30 minutes dependong how many mountains they do.

I will need to make a tutorial, because honestly, since I did the first time in the Playing with Mountains thread 3-4 months ago, I totally forgot how I did it. I will get something up soon for a real tut, but assuming I did not miss any steps:

1. Make selections(s) just like in RobA' tutorial. on a 50% grey layer
2. set the foreground color to white and background color to 50% grey
3. Use the gradiant tool set to angular gradiant.
4. This should give you white at the top and fading to grey at the bottom
5. Solid Noise about 20px (this depends on your original resolution though!)
6. Gaussian blur around 5-6px
7. IN this case, I took a med-small white fuzzy brush (using my pen for size and width differences) and "redrew" where I really wanted by ridgeline to show.
8. The real trick here is to use the smudge tool. You might want to increase the size of your selection by 20px or so to give you room to work.
9. Using the Smudge tool and a fairly small brush, go wild. I think I used a rate of about 80%. Using a pen makes this 10 times easier as you have a lot more control using the pressure sensitivity. make criss crosses, variuous angles "up the sides of the mountains" and down from the peak. Leave the ridgle line "mostly intact", but in a few places mess it up real good, especially if the messed up areas are a ways apart.
10. Run another Gaussian Blur of about 3 px
11. Turn off the selection.
12. Bump Map the layer against itself (or bump map another layer to this) using very high Elevation (80%+) Depth at Max, Ambient at Max.
13. Bump Map the layer again, this time changing Elevation downward to the 50-60 range and Ambient to 0. Look at the whole thing.
14. Set layer mode to Overlay (or, I like Hard Light) right about your ground color (brown usually)
15. You may have some "rings" from the G Blur, it so, carefully run the blur tool around to softend up the edge.
16. For a special bit of extra diminsion, you could select the layer below this one and use the Burn tool to lightly(no pun intended) darken up you shadow side, though I have not dont this yet. Ditto with dodge on the other side.

Steps 8-13 are where the try/undo comes into play. It takes a lot of practice getting to the point where they look half way decent. The smudge tool looks bad until you get the bump maps applied and it's hard to tell when you messed up the smudge strokes until you have done the bump maps.

I THINK this is somewhat close to how I did this. When time permits, I will do it up into something resembling a proper tutorial.

[ravells]

Thanks for such a complete explanation! I'm going to have to give it a try, the results are beautiful!

[jfrazierjr]

Thanks for such a complete explanation! I'm going to have to give it a try, the results are beautiful!

Glad you like it. I played for quite a while (and you will to) in order to get just the right effect. The smudges are the key to getting something that does not look all plasticy and getting some variation in slope and "cleft" lines down the mountain slopes. One thing I probably should do is try to redo these and get a few more slopes in the same area, tightening it up and not having such wide valleys. Not sure if I will have time to do that or not before the deadline.

[jfrazierjr]

Ok, added some more to the map.

• Shaded the mountains more and blended a bit better.
• Added some texture for the hills.
• Added some texture to the plains.

Todo:

• Soften the glow around the shores
• Add Forests
• Add towns/city
• Scale/Compass
• Labels

[jfrazierjr]

Small Update.

• Added some texture to the "plains"
• Cut out more water from the land base in the marsh areas
• Added some land noise for slight color variation

Still to do:

• Forests
• Towns/Cities
• Labels/Compass
• Something more with the water

### Latest WIP ###