[WIP] Castenet Regional Map - My First Map on CG

[Montcalm]

Hi Montcalm, welcome to the guild. This is looking good so far, you've done a really good job of blending in the join lines. Even knowing roughly where they should be I'm having a hard time spotting then.

Thanks! Instead of wanting to keep the original heightmap as faithful as possible, I leave a good overlap between two layers and I use a mask and a soft brush to make a better transition.

The elevation and the relief effect is excellent! Really nice work on this so far. The colours are a bit too saturated for my personal taste, but other than that it's looking really good. Looking forward to seeing this develop.

I'm not sure of the colors either. But these are good colors to work with since you can see the relief well. The adjustments to the coloring will be made at the end, especially since I constantly change my mind. I still desaturated the image a bit for now.

Yes this is very good work. The height maps are indeed excellent. I must have a look at the app you mentioned. I like to use real world height maps too from similar locations. I made some seamless height maps of mountainous areas and then roughly get the height of the map areas desired then multiply the seamless tile by the rough height and it gives the mountains in the places you want it. Its a good way to do it if your tool allows the multiplication of height maps with 16+ bit precision.

Here is the link. You zoom-in on the heightmap you want then export. The auto-exposure is great since you get better contrast depending on the min-max height on the screen.
I'm not sure I understand your method. Would you care to provide an exemple, I'd be interested!

I started working on labels, lakes and rivers. Still lot of work to do.

For the rivers, I'm not sure which way to go. Below are three methods I tried. Left: I played with the heightmap to get where the lowest ground would be. Middle: I hand-painted the rivers with a soft 3px brush. Right: I hand-painted the rivers with a hard 2px pencil. Your suggestions would be appreciated in this regard!



Here is where I am at the moment:

[EffectivePawn]

For the rivers, I'm not sure which way to go. Below are three methods I tried. Left: I played with the heightmap to get where the lowest ground would be. Middle: I hand-painted the rivers with a soft 3px brush. Right: I hand-painted the rivers with a hard 2px pencil. Your suggestions would be appreciated in this regard!



Here is where I am at the moment:

I love the whole darn map, honestly. I can't even tell where everything got stitched. I do think the colors should be a bit less saturated, but I am a rather dull individual. As for the rivers, I am a big fan of the look of the river in the middle. I think it looks better than the left, and is probably a better scale than the one on the right.