Second World Mapping Attempt
As an imaginative individual and RPGer I spend my time creating stories within various fantasy worlds. In doing so I decided to map out one such world for an encyclopedia style project I have in mind. I have messed around with several different tutorials and tried to merge a couple to create a mapping style that I like. This will be my second real attempt at mapping out a believable world. My aim is to make a more realistic looking map than say your typical fantasy map. Being as I am not the greatest judge of my own works, being a perfectionist can be a real pain at times, I am hoping to hear from others on what they think of my work so far. So any feedback, tips, or tricks to help guide me along the way will be most welcome.
Hello Kyros! That's a beautiful start!
I'm not sure I'd have snow on the mountain peaks in the equatorial regions, and I'm not super crazy about the ocean texture, since the lakes look like holes in the ground, and therefore give the continents the appearance of floating on the ocean. The rest of the layout looks really good.
I think you have the makings of a great map here. I'll look forward to seeing where it goes next
Thank you very much for the feedback.
Looking back at it, I have to agree the ocean texturing does leave much to be desired. I got the idea from looking at satellite maps of earth and seeing the rugged coastal shelves and the not so flat ocean floor. But seeing at the texture has carried over to the lakes it does indeed look more like holes than actual lakes. So this something I'll have to toy around with and see what I can do about it. As for the mountains I'll have to do a bit more research about the snow being around the equatorial areas. I kinda figured it would have to do more with the elevation of the mountains than where in the world they are. But you could be right and them being snowy is a mistake.
After I sort those out I'll be moving on the next hurtle, rivers. I have been doing some reading on what some people have done for them so I'll probably just try out some of the tutorials on here. If you know of any particular tips in dealing with them that could be helpful any suggestions would be useful.
If the mountains are high enough, it doesn't matter where they are, you are right about that. But in general, the more northerly and southerly will have the more snowy peaks, and only the few very high ranges will have snow in low latitudes.
There is a tutorial (sticky in the Tutorials section) called "How to get your rivers in the right place". Start with that! Then there is a thread in General Discussion on "Common reality errors..." that you might want to read as well.
I recognize Tamriel right in the middle there, but I don't know the other continents. If you're interested in having the Tamriel map be accurate to what's depicted in game, I've got a few resources I can point you to. If not, that's cool too.
I personally don't mind the textures by themselves, but the overall contrast levels of the map are making it hard to look at for me. If you desaturate the whole thing, you've got near total blacks next to near total whites, which is putting strain on my eyes. Google maps, on the other hand, sticks very much in the middle grays, with the darkest areas being 80% and the lightest 40%. Making it less contrasty will, I think, make it look both more pleasant and more realistic.
Indeed that is the continent of Tamriel. The Elder Scrolls games are one of my favorite series and settings, so I thought to try and recreate it in my mapping. Accuracy is something I am striving for my mapping style so I am interested in any source than could help with that endeavor. As for the coloring I will see about fixing the contrasting, darken some areas and lighten up others to more appealing to the eye. I definitely don't want a map that people can't look at. Again I thank you for bringing these issues to my attention and allowing to work on improving my works.
Like Chick is saying the texture on water doesn't look right.
On the other hand the forest textures are very nice but should be desaturated a bit (especially the darker ones are almost black).
As for the snow on mountains, the rule of thumb is that the moist adiabatic lapse rate is around -7°C/km. That means that if you have 35°C at sea level at equator, then the 0° isotherm is at 5 km altitude (35 - 7x5 = 0).
So even in a 35°C hot region, any high enough mountain will have permanent snow above 5 000 m altitude.
That leads me to mountains - I can't recognise any mountains on your map. So if there are supposed to be some, they will need more work to look mountaineously.
Thank you for the information concerning the snow on the mountain submits. As for the their looks, I made them following the Ascension atlas style tutorial so they are as pronounced as some other tutorials make. If you have a particular recommendation for a mountain tutorial that creates a realistic style or any tips to make them more visible and defined I would be grateful for them.
Toyed around with changing up the ocean textures and those of the coastal shelf. Alongside I also edited the snow ranges on some of the mountains to be more defined and less blurred. And I tried to change up the color scheming a bit to brighten it up some of the darker regions and darken up some of the brighter spots. Lastly I have started to toy around with river placement, so far only small number of rivers were placed on the continent in the upper left hand around the main lake.
So any feedback on these changes would be most welcome.
Well I like it better in this version.
In any case I think that I see now better that there are indeed some mountains.
I realized that my failure to see any before was that they had very strange shapes - I expected natural mountain ranges which would look like thin long parallel white/grey/Brown segments.
But I see now that they are wide, non parallel and short instead.
Your forest/grass texture is still very nice. Where did you find it ?
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