New Worldbuilding Project

[Sierro]

Hey all,

I've started a new map to begin worldbuilding for a novel I'll be writing. I wanted to make a larger scale map first, then I'll zoom into one region of it for the novel. I mixed a couple of tutorials from here, the base is from the Saderan tutorial but with the mountains from Ascension's Atlas Style, and I'm quite pleased with how it works together.

At the moment I'm trying to balance the green grass to biege dirt layers, and the forests. I've attached two versions of the map, one with forests hidden and one with visible.

Anyone have any suggestions on what needs doing? Are the forests too large for this sort of scale, is there not enough/too much green, etc?

[johnvanvliet]

you can blend many,many,many layers
and / or
use a air-brush tool and do some blending with that

personally for clean up and blending i like to use a airbrush
but i also do not use shading 90% of what i do is UNSHADED albedo maps until i do a 3d render

[Azélor]

If your world is unsettled, forests can span over whole continents. For example, without human activities, most of Europe would be covered by trees.

[Sierro]

So it's only taken me a couple of years to get back into map making and resurrected this project. Called it MixedWorlds as it's landmass from Saderan tutorial and mountains from Ascension's Atlas tutorial Done quite a bit of tweaking of colours etc and now looking for some feedback on anything else it needs. I've put an example city marker down, obviously there'll be a lot more added in time but I want to make sure the base world is done first - are the forests/rivers in realistic positions/sizes?

[Vanoitran]

Ultimately it is your world and you decide the laws by which it abides.

That being said, if this was Earth I would be confused -- I am associating the trees with higher atmospheric moisture content, and it just seems like there is not very much geographic consistency. Near rivers makes sense, on the windward side of mountains, and so on. This entails making a world building element of ocean currents and jet streams. Just imagine where the wet air would be and, as Azelor said, it seems relatively unpopulated save for the one city, so there is the potential for massive forest growth. As far as rivers are concerned, they seem well positioned.

But once again, its your world and I don't claim to know how the ecosystem there works. And finally, this is an amazing map! It really gets my imagination running.

[Sierro]

Ultimately it is your world and you decide the laws by which it abides.

That being said, if this was Earth I would be confused -- I am associating the trees with higher atmospheric moisture content, and it just seems like there is not very much geographic consistency. Near rivers makes sense, on the windward side of mountains, and so on. This entails making a world building element of ocean currents and jet streams. Just imagine where the wet air would be and, as Azelor said, it seems relatively unpopulated save for the one city, so there is the potential for massive forest growth. As far as rivers are concerned, they seem well positioned.

But once again, its your world and I don't claim to know how the ecosystem there works. And finally, this is an amazing map! It really gets my imagination running.

Thanks for the feedback! That's the sort of thing I was after really, whether the placement makes sense in a realistic Earth environment. Gotta know what the rules are to know when best to break them, right? It's gonna be fully populated I just haven't put the settlements on yet save for that one test marker, which I know may affect the placement of forests. I've redone some of the rivers a bit after reading the thread about getting rivers right too.

[Creativetides]

I like it but maybe ad a few more rivers

[Sierro]

Did a rough heightmap thing to try to work out where rivers would form and then drew them in appropriately. Quite pleased with the results though I'm sure they still have problems Gonna take another look at the forests next and then get plopping some settlements on!

[johnvanvliet]

keep in mind that the amazon river mouth is only 1 to 2 pixels across in a BIG map

and the nile is only seen because of the lights along the river and the farmland along the shores

[Sierro]

Yeah on a second appraisal the rivers are a bit too wide. The scale I'm going for is something similar to Tear's Westeros map really. I'll trim them back a bit , thanks for the feedback!