Land of the Eleven Tribes

[Djekspek]

hehe, both looking great. personally, i like the drop-shadow better (little more depth but i'm not sure if it fits with the scale). btw it seems your rivers are floating a bit above the forest, maybe ease a bit on the bevel? or is there some glow/shadow on it (cant really point out why the river looks elevated).

[Steel General]

No 'nit picks' from me, I think it looks good so far.

[Gandwarf]

Very nice... no comments from me. Certainly up to par with your earlier work, maybe somewhat better even.

[LonewandererD]

"The Kaiga Stones. Carved from the bones of the gargantuan Miga-Junts, the surfaces of these posts are painted with intricate symbols of Junt blood and powered spirit bones and enchanted with many an ancient incantations. It is said that these posts have the power to repel malevolent spirits when they face outwards, or imprison a spirit when they face inwards, in either case creating a magical wall that block all except the most powerful of uninvited spirits. The Humans and Ithekins of Evelakaia line their villages and towns with these to protect against malevolent spirits while the Majud L'Kia (Judgement Caste) and Sol L'Kia (Spirit Castes) use them to imprison particulary violent and powerful spirit-beasts."

I thought it might be interesting to provide a little snippet of my background story with each post just to add some extra depth to my map. Anyways onto the map. I went back and played around with the thickness of the rivers and added a river delta as suggested by Ascension and fixed up the two little forests mistakes that JFJ pointed out. I also detailed more of the map and added a new layer on top of my grassland layer to make the transition of forest to grasses smoother and to make the forests more vibrant. Right now I'm experimenting with a new water texture and then I'm going to move onto to cleaning up the western frontier. All in all most of the terrain is done and I'll move onto towns and such soon. Again this shaping up to be one of those maps that you have too zoom in to see as it was intended.

-D-

[Tear]

That's coming along well.

One thing you could try if you want:
Instead of the soft fading from forest to mountains, put some light forest on the mountain edges, just like you did in several places when going from forest to grassland.
This way the forest till gradually thin as it goes uphill instead of fading into haze.
You'd have to be careful not to overdo it, but I think it's worth a try.

[LonewandererD]

I tired do that Tear but the problem is that the mountain peak layer is above the forest layer and the edges of the mountain peaks are faded anyway so anything that is under it would also be faded. I tried putting the forests above the mountains but the the forests seem to overpower the mountains a bit (if that makes sense) which made the map look a little flat. Also I have some small mountains that wouldn't do so well if i changed them.

-D-

[Tear]

I'd try adding an extra layer above the mountains and do some tree sprinkling there, so you can try things completely independent from your main forest.
Maybe copy the forest's layer styles over, maybe not. See what works better.

Just some thoughts.

[wormspeaker]

Wow! Very nice. The nearly finished work looks great.

[Gandwarf]

Two nitpicks, both concerning rivers:

- Some of the rivers seem to float above the terrain...
This is especially noticeable near the mountains to the bottom left (and then the rivers in the northern part of those mountains). The drop shadow near where the rivers start is too much.

- Sometimes the amount of river branches seems overdone. For example: the rivers near the mountains to the bottom right. So many branches it doesn't seem right to me.

Otherwise very cool as I stated before.

[LonewandererD]

Thnx for pointing out the river problems Gandwarf, no idea how i missed them . Hopefully these rivers are better, I couldn't completely fix them up and a lot of what has been done to make them look as such is very difficult to undo at this stage.

I also went back and tried to improve the transition of forest to mountain as Tear suggested, I think I found a way to do it.

-D-