Progress on my world of Koreth, wanting feedback.

[Naima]

Attachment 136385

Here is a full world map with some continent/ocean names for reference.

The world is looking awesome, I love the shapes of the continents, very natural and diverse than the usual Earthlike shape, everything seems perfectly made , good job.
One question I have what is your workflow for the satellite-style looking style? I especially like the forest, that although not realistic at that eye view, are enjoyable and very nice .

[shadixdarkkon]

Hey Naima! Thank you for the kind words, you're another person on here who is a big inspiration to me. For the satellite style I used something similar to hypsometric tinting for the base colors, one gradient for temperate and one gradient for desert regions, then masked them together. For the forests, I use a two layers. One is a noise map that gets a green gradient applied, and the other is a bump map made from the noise map. I put them both in a layer group in photoshop and mask out the whole group, then add the forests in where I want them using selection tools and painting them in.

[Naima]

Hey Naima! Thank you for the kind words, you're another person on here who is a big inspiration to me. For the satellite style I used something similar to hypsometric tinting for the base colors, one gradient for temperate and one gradient for desert regions, then masked them together. For the forests, I use a two layers. One is a noise map that gets a green gradient applied, and the other is a bump map made from the noise map. I put them both in a layer group in photoshop and mask out the whole group, then add the forests in where I want them using selection tools and painting them in.

Well its extremely good, and thankyou for the answers. You tinted in Photoshop? Also, I noticed that your elevation look smooth and do not feature much erosion due to tools but seem to keep the heightmap ones, did you use the heightmaps straight away and just blended in photoshop or you did some erosion in external tools? Because I am not sure to see those as the rivers seem to be mostly painted in as wanted rather than as could come out of an erosion ? Not a critique , just wondering, I instead usually always pass erosion , by partial or as a whole on the whole planet to have a consistant river network , this though might "ruin" some of the elevations, to avoid that I overscale the elevations in wilbur then I apply filters, usually at 11000m scale.
btw what is you maximum size of the map ? I can't usually go beyond 21000 without severe lag and issues on my pc :0 .

[shadixdarkkon]

I used two different gradients for the hypsometric coloring, and then used masks to blend the two different gradients together how I wanted for deserts/temperate areas.

For the rivers aspect, all of the terrain is just blended in photoshop, no erosion or anything applied. I did hand draw all the rivers, good eye on that. I haven't found a good non-destructive way to do the erosion as of yet due to certain areas not playing well with Wilbur or Quadspinner Gaea.

The full map size is 30,000px by 15,000px. I have pretty beefy computer that I use for mapmaking so it can handle the large filesize pretty well in photoshop, but its still eating up like 30 gigs of RAM when I have the full thing open.

[Naima]

I used two different gradients for the hypsometric coloring, and then used masks to blend the two different gradients together how I wanted for deserts/temperate areas.

For the rivers aspect, all of the terrain is just blended in photoshop, no erosion or anything applied. I did hand draw all the rivers, good eye on that. I haven't found a good non-destructive way to do the erosion as of yet due to certain areas not playing well with Wilbur or Quadspinner Gaea.

The full map size is 30,000px by 15,000px. I have pretty beefy computer that I use for mapmaking so it can handle the large filesize pretty well in photoshop, but its still eating up like 30 gigs of RAM when I have the full thing open.

A sugestion I tried to have good erosion non destructive is use masks and worldmachine river tool, but You'd better use on single continents or chunks of land then photoshop blend work.
Btw I am trying to find some decent heightmaps of earth in superhigh res like 80k or more but I can only find bin and dem files I am not able to turn into heightmaps, do you have any idea where I can I find largest possible heightmap for it? The one I use and found is only 21k.

[shadixdarkkon]

I used the SRTM data and an addon for photoshop called GeographicImager which has a two week free trial. It lets photoshop manage DEM files, so you can put the STRM data in, convert it to a PNG or whatever, and go from there hopefully. It should be around 80k.

[shadixdarkkon]

Another quick update, this time just some more islands finished and some adjustments to the bump mapping and colors on the satellite view. I think I'm about done with the geography of the planet, so I've added a bonus map of the planet showing the areas inhabited by the various species before humans evolve along with human migration routes around the globe.

[shadixdarkkon]

Just a small update, I've started naming places. Do my labels stand out enough against the map itself?

[Diamond]

I would avoid red and green for your labels; it's very hard to pick them out even for folks that aren't color-blind. If you absolutely have to have red and green, maybe try a 1 or 2 pixel stroke of white around them to help make them stand out.

[Tiana]

Definitely add a stroke on all the text. The size is good though.