Umbria -- Another Attempt at Topography

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

I must have a burning case of cartography fever, as I've been sitting at my computer for eight straight hours trying to refine my process: realistic topo without relying on DEM data. By the way, please disregard my previous entry; yes those blobs don't look like mountains at ALL. (Perhaps I deserve to be demoted in reputation by a bar or so?)

Anyways, I used Photoshop to draw my mountain ranges, and Wilbur to route the rivers, fill the lakes, and erode the mountains. I realize some specific details might not be scientifically accurate.

As always, I appreciate feedback; please let me know if I'm improving, regressing, or stagnating. If you Guild members like this map, then perhaps I'll become motivated to finish it by adding labels, art, and even lore.

Peter

[Tiana]

Yes... we've all been infected by the Cartographic Plague. If you check out the Lite Challenge, someone has even illustrated a sample of the virus responsible for the cartographic fever.

Don't let your motivation stem from other people, you must be your first motivation, from a love of the art, from a love of the worldbuilding. I think your watershed is stellar, and this map looks like it could use some labels. That bottom right invites a label.

[woodb3kmaster]

Overall, I think this is probably the best of your recent attempts at realistic topography so far. I've been following your efforts and can see plenty of improvement in just the past few months. Of course, I'm no geologist, but to my admittedly untrained eyes, this landscape looks quite realistic. A version with hillshading and a legend (for the elevation colors, if not also the horizontal scale) would make the realism easier to evaluate, but even without them, there are no obvious issues, IMO.

The one suggestion I can offer is to walk us through your process (on future maps, if not this one) as you refine it. It needn't be a polished tutorial at this stage, since you're still tweaking your process, but a description of the steps you took in making a given map will most likely help other Guild members offer advice that will improve the process (e.g. through their own experiments). Many hands make light work, multiple heads are better than one, etc. etc.