January Entry: Galerius Hallow

[mmmmmpig]

I am enjoying this one greatly

[Midgardsormr]

Thanks for the encouragement. It's been slow going what with school projects competing for time. I may not get it finished in time, though I shall give it my best. I've got a lot more of the terrain work done: forest, river, and rocky cliffs. There are a few too many sandbars--I'll go through and erase a lot of them, especially the ones in the pond. I may have to adjust my scale, too. These rivers have run 50 - 70 miles since leaving the mountains; should they be carrying less water? More?

Anyway, once I get the grass in and poke some holes in the forest, I'll probably turn my attention to the village to see if I can get that built and composited prior to the deadline. I don't think I'll be able to do the lower half of the image by then, though, so my submission is going to be only this portion.

So, without further ado:
### Latest WIP ###

[Steel General]

Coming along nicely, hope you have time to finish it.

[Gamerprinter]

Hey Midgard - it happens to us all, I've started map challenges, not finished my map, but still got a couple votes anyway. So unless you don't get something started at all, as long as there is some content to vote on - you always have a chance. Thanks for competing no matter what!

GP

[Midgardsormr]

Thanks, GP. School hit me hard the first two weeks; hopefully the projects don't continue to be so heavy through the entire quarter or I'm going to go insane! This map will undoubtedly get finished eventually, but it might be a while.

[Hoel]

Very nice texture work there. And the heightmap is so cool.
The only thing I can find to say somthing negative about is the river.. It looks like you used some sort of glass bevel or chrome filter on it and it doesn't look realistic.
Oh and about the textures. I think the green one you have now works better as grass (with a bit of different colors, dry grass on the hills maybe). A forest texture should be more clumpy and vary more in hue, even on this scale.
It may be a feature, but you have some sort of thing on the cliff right on the eastern map edge, it kinda looks like a crack.
Where did you get the rock texture? It works very good

[Midgardsormr]

I imagine the rock texture came from cgtextures.com. It's the same one I used last year for Mennin's Hallow, so it was still in the folder. I'm not sure which crack you're referring to, but there's one that's part of the texture and one that I missed when I was covering the seams.

There are two effects on the river: one is a very wide outer stroke set to dissolve that makes those sandy banks. The other is an inner glow that creates the sandbars. I think the latter effect is the one that's making it look beveled. Hopefully going in and erasing some of the sand bars will help with that. There are really far too many at the moment, and they shouldn't appear in the lake at the confluence.

I think the trees work much better where they're not covering so much of the landscape. I've experimented with tearing some holes in the canopy, but what I've done so far hasn't looked quite right. Eventually, there won't be any trees in the village area, and they'll be much more sparse in the rain basin to the south. I think I need to look at some aerial photos to get a better sense of real forests. We don't have any where I'm from.

I'll keep your guidance in mind when I enter the next iteration of the map. I'm thinking I might do something with a plasma overlay to add some variance to that texture. I'm also going to chop the scale in half, I think. Or double it? How does that work?

[Hoel]

Sand banks.. heh. It makes sense, but they do look like glares.
If you add some water texture, or a inner glow to the water layer, they might blend better.

I think you should go down in scale, it's a village and will be very tiny on a ~12 mile map.

[Midgardsormr]

Due to the incompatibility between the CGTextures.com license and the CC license of the CWBP, this map (unfinished as it is), is withdrawn from inclusion in the Collaborative Worldbuilding Project. The Creative Commons license is unlawful and cannot therefore be enforced. This map is currently All Rights Reserved until such time as it is redrafted or the CGTextures image is relicensed to permit use in a Creative Commons project.

[Redrobes]

Sure. What textures do you need to replace as I am out and about with my camera all the time and have a pretty good collection of stuff. If you just sub them can you then get the image back up pretty quick again or does it need work on it to put the textures in place ?