My First Map

[soarespatrick]

Hello friends,

here is my first map. This is the map that my group use to play. I used the Photoshop 7 Over World Map Tutorial, link here, the OldGuy's Tutorial on Creating Realistic Coastlines, link in the home page, beside some of my own knowledge and others minor tips from the forum. I know this can improve but I liked the initial results.

All the text in the map are in portuguese (I'm Brazilian) and it have more roads and towns, it's no completely finished yet, but the general idea is there.

Coments and critiques please.

Sorry, I don't know how to use the neat thumbnail thing yet.

[Jaxilon]

Those mountains make me really hungry for some reason...I think they look a little like they might be made out of chocolate. Despite that, I do like the shape they have. I wish I could get that result in gimp but so far no dice. I don't use photoshop but it seems like next time you might try building some color into them so they don't look quite so barren - unless they are supposed to be barren slabs of brown rock.

You also should be aware that the river police will probably come by and point you in the right direction. There are a number of river violations but we have a really good thread in here somewhere that will help you out with that. Basically, rivers may flow INTO a lake but only 1 river will flow out and that usually to the Sea. There are a few exceptions but usually unnatural ones.

It's a nice bright map and the forests look good from this distance.

[ravells]

Great start Patrick, but as Jax said the rivers are doing some seriously weird stuff. There is a post on the guild about how rivers behave and how to draw them.

The coastline looks really smooth, I would have throught it would have looked much rougher if you used Oldguy's tutorial.

Drawing your first map is always a great feeling!

best

Ravs

[soarespatrick]

Thanks for the coments Jaxilon and ravells. =)

The collor of the montains is easy to change, I'll try some others tones.
But I'm all guilty by violating the river physics, I know it have weird behavior and I knew that while I was creating, but that is how the original map was, the one my DM created so, blame on him.

And about the Oldguy's tutorial I don't used it exactly like it was described, I made some changes because my map was too big and I noticed that the Oldguy's tutorial dont work very well for high resolutions. I guess some people was talking something like that in other threads.

I'm thinking in aplly some snow on the mountains, but for some reason when I save the file the mountains change its deep/behavior, I dont know why. But well, chocolate mountains with cream on top would be nice. XD

Thanks again, the forum is so nice and the people here seems cool. Talk to you soon.

[tilt]

looking good - you could make an extra layer on top of the mountains layer - add som clouds FILTER>RENDER>CLOUDS in mountain colors (fore and background to shades of rock) - then ALT+CLICK on the border between the two layers to only use the color layer where the mountains are - and then you can play with layer blend modes and layer effects to affect your mountains
great first map and have some rep with my mace of ok repping +4

[Katto]

Have some rep for your first map. You looked critcally at it and will improve with the next one

[soarespatrick]

looking good - you could make an extra layer on top of the mountains layer - add som clouds FILTER>RENDER>CLOUDS ...

That's a great idea, Tilt. Thank you very much, I'll try it on my next session.