Romeria -- Topographic

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

Although I admit my process isn't as realistic as what my role models here are capable of (especially Ilanthar and morne), I've nonetheless settled on some average hand-drawn terrain and developed the world as extensively as possible. The entire map and insets were created on Photoshop, Wilbur, and Clima-Sim. For those interested, the entire world was modeled on Clima-Sim and the inset diagrams showing two distinctive climates were generated; rainfall values are estimated based on an axial tilt of 27.58 degrees and an eccentricity of 0.0227, with the perihelion set in the northern summer.

I realize my river and lake labels might be a bit illegible, but I didn't want to rescale the image.

I hope you like it, as it represents four weeks of diligent work.

Peter

[Arimel]

Really nice looking map! The colors are very legible and I like the way you have portrayed the sea depth/land elevation in the key.

[Elatan]

Amazing! It doesn't just look good, it's cool that you have so much informations about it.

[Peter Toth]

Thank you so much Arimel and Elatan!

I appreciate your support and your interest in this rather unpopular mapmaking style. I know it's nowhere near as stunning as many I've seen (morne sets the ultimate standard here), it's an effort towards continual improvement.

By the way, I'd also like to thank many of you, especially Arsheesh, Pixie, morne, and Ilanthar, for giving me the inspiration to keep churning out maps. (The next planet-sized map I create will make use of Pixie's climate tutorial.)

And for the administrators, I don't mean to raise a fuss, but I didn't see my reputation points increase with this submission.

I hope you're all well.

Peter

[waldronate]

I don't know that I would say that it's particularly unpopular, just relatively specialized for a relatively small market that values realism for unreal places.
I think that you've gotten to the point where you're able to consistently produce plausible terrain. There are still a few minor things that cause me a bit of distraction like the scattered rivers that break up here and there and the aliased map grid, but those can be overcome with some Photoshop work, I would think. The non-terrain items (the map frills like border and so on) are stylistically consistent and add an extra level of plausibility that's nice to see. The colors are a little saturated, and a quick adjustment layer in Photoshop to desaturate the colors (and maybe shift the whole thing toward a sepia tone to give the impression of cheap paper) might push the composition toward a more old-time atlas feeling.
As far as reputation goes, I'm told that it's mostly a matter of awards by others and only a small component relating to number of posts.

[Meton]

I think that's a really good job with atlas-styled maps! Maybe it's a small niche of mapmaking but I wouldn't call it unpopular. The terrain is really realistic and plausible, the color scheme is really balanced although a bit saturated as waldronate mentioned. I like the city and road placement too.

If this is an Earth-like planet, I have to say however that a temperature variation between + 10 and +30 Celsius in Ethan doesn't sound right for 65N latitude, even if the axial tilt is bigger than in Earth. Maybe there is something that explains that?

[Ilanthar]

A fine map, Peter! I like the shape and the numerous data displayed (and the climatic diagrams for sure ).
And I'll concur with Waldronate good advices.

[Peter Toth]

Thank you Waldronate, Meton, and Ilanthar!

Yes, very good advice with the saturation--next time I'll surely aim for something less saturated. The graticules were a minor problem, as I had to use Fractal Terrains 3 to generate them, after I'd settled on a map scale and "planet radius." (I had decided on a somewhat smaller planet relative to Earth; I don't remember exactly although such data can definitely be determined by correlating the graticule spacing and the scale.) To fix the aliasing, perhaps in the future I could do a slight gaussian blur on the graticule in its separate layer?

Thank you Meton, for your interest. The climate was determined using the following parameters:

(1) a smaller semimajor axis providing 3% more insolation than the earth (making this planet somewhat hotter).

(2) an axial tilt of 27.5 degrees, giving more seasonal variation in temperatures, especially poleward.

(3) an eccentricity of 0.035 (over 2 times Earth's), with the perihelion set in the northern summer. This effect generates even hotter summer temperatures in the northern poleward latitudes.

Also, I trusted the Clima-Sim program to generate the temperatures; the precipitation was determined manually, using seasonally shifting subtropical high and subpolar low pressure cells. I also based the values according to similar locations on Earth, such as eastern Siberia for Ethan, and southern Spain for Mirvanna.

Again, thank you for the critiques and feedback. I'm working on the next one already.

Peter

[waldronate]

The simplest "fix" for aliasing is to use multi-sampling: export your graticule at two or four times your desired final resolution and then resample the image to the final resolution before compositing it on its own layer. You might want to increase your line thickness before doing the export. Using blur to fix aliasing without resampling never looks quite right. Sometimes you can upsample the image, blur it, and then downsample again, but it's still not as good as simple multi-sampling (unless you've got one of those fancy filters like { http://www.johanneskopf.de/publicati...art/index.html }, but that's not exactly simple blurring).