Untitled layer mask test

[Coyotemax]

a darn fine sandy beach texture, and layer effects out into the water if people keep asking about them, i might pack up my textures and offer them out as a zip download or something.

[Andartar]

Hahaha.. I thought as much. I'll have to go hunting on CG textures for som sand next time.

[Coyotemax]

Andartar: Here, I'll make that search real easy may these be as useful as they are for me!

craggles: I chopped the file down to 300x500 and it's still almost 90 megs. I think it's all the texture patterns loaded in with it. I'll give a try at recreating what I was doing with simple colour fills to kep the filesize sane.

[ravells]

Very nice textures and a beautiful map, Coyote. Can you crosspost these textures into the mapping elements subforum please? They will more easily 'findable' there.

Glad to see you've found the jiggle filter useful. It's a gem.

Cheers

ravs

[Coyotemax]

Actually I'm going to bunch up the stuff I currently have into texture packs and upload them as zips, so no worries there

As to Jiggle, I've actually had the eyecandy filters for.. almost 7 years i think. I upgraded from 5.5 to 7 and some of the filters I had at the time wouldn't move across to 7, so I gave up on all of them thinking it was a compatibility issue (i still have my 5.5 installed in case I deeded anything, but it dropped off my radar before long). the other day I was going through my archived backups and noticed my plugin backups and figured heck why not. Much to my surprise, eyecandy and xenofex installed no problem, so I figured I'd give your tut a whirl. Glad I did

[ravells]

Try using the jiggle in conjunction with Pasis's mountains. Makes fantastic foothills.

[Coyotemax]

That's actually more or less what I did with this map, actually. There's 5 mountain layers, each with an increasing level of bevel effect (a la pasis) that i'd set up first. I selected the area within the mask, and decreased the size for each layer by 50 with a 50px feather. Then I found a jiggle setting that made me happy (I laugh every time I reread that) and just went through and applied it to each layer going down. Base layer stayed as is, and beach layer goes under. I then selected the base layer and removed the selection area from layer 3, and that gave me the area for my forest overlay. It was actually rather easy to do once I got the layer style headaches out of the way.

[ravells]

Then I found a jiggle setting that made me happy (I laugh every time I reread that)

Tell me about it. I'd be singing 'Why don't you jiggle it, just a little bit' while I was using that filter.

[Coyotemax]

Ok, this is a test at a larger scale - I think maybe I'll call it more than a test and do a bit more tweaking then call it finished.

And I've definitely become a lot more comfortable with using masks for terrain. I didn't even refer back to the tutorials or working notes this time!

AslanC and I are working on a redesign for his world, and I suspect we've got a finalized version at last. I'm planning on using the masking to do the entire map (8000x5000 if i recall) and do the whole darn thing in one go so it's more consistent this time. It wasn't bad before, but a few of the areas looked far too much like 2 straight edged maps pasted together (which in a way, was exactly what they were).

I'm also debating the merits of the entire layer being filled with pattern before masking, or just the continents themselves being filled in (maybe with a bit of overlap for tweaking). Considering it's the same seamless tiled pattern, would the full layer be more of a memory load?

So, we now present Atlantis (more or less)...


Anyhow, here's the Atlantis analog!

[craggles]

It's looking very sexy now!