Mapbuilding General

>Expand the desert
>Update the map key to include those other symbols and lines

Given where the rivers are, the location of two of those orange cities(?) doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment. The paradox of a city is that it grows over the best farmland and there are plenty of river valleys and deltas that would make for good locations, unless you're going for a modern setting where water can be piped to other locations where urban sprawl occurs.

The only dedicated program worth using is Wilbur, I feel like. It does great erosion work.

Has anyone here ever made maps of space?

Rivers are fucked. Streams only combine on the continental scale except for coastal deltas. Lakes have one drain. A short river fed from only the watershed of a small range won't have a super huge delta.

That looks really beautiful, user. Meticulous and geographically appealing.

I'd definitely like to improve to that point.

it's ugly but functional. for ms paint that's actually pretty impressive though

Dude how the fuck did you get this out of fucking PaintNET?? All this years I was using it just to crop images and make my fb pics less uglier

It's pretty snowy aside from the grassland valley and the desert.

can you repeat that in a way a moron could understand

Work in progress that I have kinda abandoned because I couldn't figure out how to implement terrain heightmap more detailed than just plains/hills/mountains into this artstyle
eh

Mind you that those are supposed to be continents not some tiny ass islands.
I planned to make a close-up map of every region with more details in order not to clutter the world map.

>know exactly how worldmap looks in my head
>can't draw for shit, even using all the map building programs

RIP

This is what I'm working on. I gotta put in the FUCKING TREES.

A map I made today out of boredom. Might use it in the furture, not sure yet.

slapping random bits about isn't exactly "making a map"

STOP RIGHT THERE VANDASCUM

What do you mean? I didn't slap random bits around. I had an idea and I ran with it.

Damn, got a guid how you did it?

guide*
Especially the way you draw those mountains and trees.

Just drew 'em. I watched some videos of some guys drawing maps and copied what they did but with a mouse in GIMP.

Could you link the video?

>youtube.com/channel/UCvYwePdbWSEwUa-Pk02u3Zw?&ab_channel=QuestingBeast

This entire channel has stuff on the subject. Their tutorials playlist is good.

>youtube.com/watch?v=p1eo-SzLCcY

WASD20 has a series oh him drawing a map.

>youtube.com/watch?v=WUFG8yeJRuw
This one is a more detailed way to do mountains

>youtube.com/watch?v=HLmOpEETjEo

This video, while not the best, is still good for specific information

>youtube.com/watch?v=xRQ1PbxJujU

I haven't watched through this video in its entirely, but it's a part 1 of 2 for a map making series.

All of the techniques applied in these videos can easily transfer to digital mouse drawing in GIMP.

I personally use line smoothing at a low weight with the brush set up to vary the width based on the speed I move my mouse. Once you get used to it, you can mimic the linework of someone using a tablet decently enough to matter. Of course, using a tablet is the best approach.

Thanks!

Thanks for taking the high road when it comes to making fun of continent names. You're better than my players.

Why do they all end in -cum?

Same reason ours end in -ca

I drew a picture.

>I couldn't figure out how to implement terrain heightmap more detailed than just plains/hills/mountains into this artstyle
Fuck, does anyone have a tutorial on this? I've been working on maps in Photoshop for a bit and the coasts, rivers, forests look fine, but I can't fucking figure out how to draw detailed mountains.

WIP of my current campaign's map. I have a Hexographer file I used for general layout, but it is way more interesting to throw out realistic space and just draw shit. There's a bunch of stuff in there that just came out of doodling around hills and stuff.

Still very much a rough drawing though.

Look at mountain ranges on Google Maps.
Mid Scotland (where I am), Canada and Russia are great for this sort of stuff.

Start off with your lowest color as a foundation.
Then draw your lightest color in the middle.
Then smudge back and forth in V shapes around the core of it. Don't make them exactly the same, make some tiny, some large, just keep going around and around.
Then start adding little highlights and shadows.
Then start adding some sparse vegetation.
Then add some snow at the tips of the mountains. (this is mostly true even in hot regions if they are high mountains)

If it is a snowy region, look at Antarctica, really far north Russia and Canada.
Then give up trying to convey mountains in snowy regions and just blanket white everywhere with some light cyan shading.

Then you can start drawing sparse carvings where rivers start to come together.
If you want to see what this looks like, just trace a river touching the ocean backwards until you find the sources of the river.
The tributaries get finer and finer, and in higher number, the further up the land they go.
Make good use of opacity at 5% at these levels. It should eventually just blend in to the land.
The best way to not have to deal with this too much is always have your rivers spawn out of forests around the tips of mountains. Plus, forests just look neat at mountain ranges.
Bitches love mountain forests.

Thanks user, I didn't pay attention in geography. What is the difference between the deltas, though? The only difference I'm seeing is one is much longer.

The implication on the far right is that they're only going to flatten out right by the sea, where the land is incredibly flat and thus that can happen. Most of the time, however, rivers look like the reverse, converging towards the sea.

A delta forms when a river hits a body of water (typically the ocean) in an very flat area. In this environment there is no longer a single more efficient path for the water to follow and small differences can make the river split. Here the water runs slowly and carried sediments sink to the ground, forming new obstacles for the river and the flow is altered further.

I don't see why not

Everything good ends with cum.

It is when it is in developed lands.
Forests kept in blobs, farms, cities too.
Empty land with roads diving around them in the lowlands.

Obviously the map is simplified.

A beach would be fine too.
Maybe have some hilly regions between some of the roads, or even some small rocky regions that are not so mountainous.
Definitely change the text color though.

Yeah I followed the 4th video and used GIMP as well a few weks back, I ended up with this. I thought the brushes he linked were pretty useful.

Also first map, other than I forgot to add lakes any other glaring problems standing out to anyone?

>The area within the mountains that is coloured-in is about 150 miles across
You won't THAT much diversity then. 150miles are basically what separates Montpellier from Nice, and as someone who loves (and kinda knows) the region I can tell you it's pretty much the same climate and landscape... untill you reach some bigass moutiains like the Alps to the East, or the Pyrennées to the West. The only different climates you can have, if you stay at the same longitude, is somewhere deep in the middle of a continent or at a different latitude.
What kind of latitude are you even at ? What kind of races exist ? Let's say you go with steppes, then you could have tribes of fierce spear-throwing centaurs dominate the place. Or, if the climate is more like Italy/Spain's, it could be peaceful meadows inhabitted by halflings. Alternatively, if you go for something more like Australia it would something else
Is the desert in the middle an orc-infested wasteland, or a barren pieace of land devoid of life safe for a few nomadic tribes ? They'd be stupid to live in such a little desert, especially with all the farmland around; so they'd have a good reason: maybe they're goblins nowone wants to see around ? Or religious fanatics that willingly chose exile ? What if an asteroid crashed somewhere East of the mountains East of the desert, killing all life that was there ? Or what if it sank under a tsunami ? Actually scratch that, the mountains are a huge volcano that keeps vomiting gigantic ash clouds that make the desert the inhabitable mess that it is.
If the stars represent cities, then you'd need a good reason to have a city there. Where does the food come from ? What about fishing and naval trade ? Those wouldn't be possible in stormy waters, at least not without enough technology. Think the indians had many fishing boats in Florida/Louisiana ?
Any of these suggestions could be a bad idea for a lot of reasons, it all depends what kind of setting you're going for.

Fucking love the map, good jon man.

this, distance is important for consistency

Is the yellow desert or plains? The colour's a bit ambiguous.

This looks like the map of middle-earth in the back of my 1st edition fellowship of the ring

Use Inkarnate. It'll be as easy as using Paint, but look way, way better.

www.inkarnate.com

Not mine, same edition I found on google

I don't know how zoomed in this is or if the black line is border or ocean, but is it's ocean it could use some more island /half island. Just something that makes it more inconsistent. I think it would add life in the same way your many rivers does

Here's my Not-Europa setting map. Please excuse the stylistic inconsistencies - I'm in the middle of redoing the topography and coastlines.

I hate doing individual trees so much. I just went with a set of Photoshop patterns and filters on a color blob.

Wrong image.

I really like the style, sadly the geography it depicts is Europe with birth defects.

I might do the copy-paste route once I get big enough areas. Copy an area, paste it somewhere completely different, and erase bits until it looks right. Rinse and repeat.

thx

just a crop so its not the best when it comes to resolution

On the smaller land mass its plains, they're different colours, but ended up pretty similar so I put tufts of grass on the plains and left the desert a flat colour to help distinguish them.

Yeah those mountains look nice

He did say.
Does the North Sea have a name in this setting?

Looks Tolkien, pretty fucking good.

Not yet. Got any suggestions?

That can get complicated with lots of little trees. You might try combining a generic forest pattern, like the clouds used in , with little individual trees on the borders.

Nice.

looks great user