Rammstein -- Another Noble Attempt at Realism

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

This map was created in about five hours entirely on Photoshop and Wilbur, and represents my latest attempts to produce realism without juxtaposing actual Earth satellite DEM data (which I remember morne saying was "difficult").

I'm not going to bore you with lore or anything; I didn't come up with much of a backstory except that it's another realm of my imagination, which I like to visit often.

I humbly ask of you Guild Artisans or anyone knowledgeable: Could you please critique this map, and let me know what can be improved to make it more realistic.

Thank you so much and happy new year!

Peter

Ramstein.png

[- JO -]

Very nice job !
It's very neat, very precise !
I guess, you could add shadings and nuances, to make it look more realistic.
I mean, for example, nuances of green for the forests, and nuances of grey or brown for the mountains.
You could try to add waves in the sea
And overall, more shades to give relief, around rivers, on the sides of valleys, and so on.
On top of that, you could add clouds in some places
I don't know if that's good ideas or bad, it's just what I would try.
But I find your map really nice the way it is now : it has an "atlas" look that I love

[Peter Toth]

Thank you JO!

I was thinking of maybe rendering it as a satellite map, showing deserts, forests and alpine areas, with a cloud texture on top.

I appreciate your feedback and, while I rarely follow through with the same project, I'm going to try amplifying the relief around my rivers and lower elevation areas. I have to admit, until today I processed the entire image's altitudes together; whereas today I'm processing the lower altitudes and higher altitudes separately and blending them in the final Photoshop image.

Again, my appreciations for the suggestions!

Peter

[Tiana]

The trick to the earth satellite data is using a program where you can rotate the clone stamp as well as horizontally and vertically flip it. Otherwise it is truly miserable. It's not my preferred way to work, I've done it once on request. I prefer to use a blend of texture application and digital painting to get to results. What did you do for this one? It strikes me as less satellite and more of a formal topography, it's nice and crisp, gets a bit too pixelated on the zoom but otherwise very nice when it just fills the screen. The technique turned out good for the look and I think you'll get great results if you keep developing this version of it. Great clarity of data.

The one thing that's a bit weird to me about this is the mountains, just trying to imagine what's going on with the tectonic plates is giving me a bit of a headache. It feels like a fantasy continent to me. Maybe if you kept going on the ocean depth mapping it would clarify what's going on down there. I look forward to seeing some detailed 'ocean mapping' in this style, something often neglected!