I've been tinkering about in GIMP making a World Map for my digital comic and would welcome any feedback on this so far.

My process consists of using Gaussian Blur on some greyscale image layers and then applying these as Bump Maps to the image.

Here's what I have:



Next I'm going to add some text.

Hi, Artloader, a very nice beginning to a map. If you like some help or inspiration, you may want to visit http://www.cartographersguild.com

It seems like the hills / mountains seem to be orientated towards the centre of the land, which doesn't come across as natural looking.

artloader: playing with blur and bumping is heaps of fun ! enjoy making your maps and by all means follow that cartographer's guild link, i've spent some enjoyable hours reading stuff there and i don't even like maps...
i don't know where mountains are likely to be placed for real, but can agree with david-c that they probably wouldn't all be in the central parts of the landmasses.

Looks pretty neat so far! I, too, agree with david-c, though. My own geology is a little rusty, but I remember a few basics. Start with the underlying tectonic plates--where are the borders? Those will determine where the mountains are. You don't usually find mountains in the center of the continents because you don't usually find plate borders there, either.

There's a good map on this page: http://poleshift.ning.com/profiles/blog ... ristchurch

There are a few borders that cut straight through land, but most of them are in the ocean, near the edges of the continents. Where the borders are, there are mountains.

Awesome - I'm so glad a asked this forum for advice - a very good point about my mountain placement - thank you all. I think I'll go back and decide where my tectonic plates are first - then place my mountains

abool63: Thank you for the link - that is a really good site - I will be browsing with interest.

I went back and decided on my tectonic plates:

Now this tickles my fantasy! (pun intended) I used to play around with map-making before I had such good GIMPness as I have now. Or as good a camera. Anyway, I was inspired to do this quick sketch showing a map made from nature's own fractals -- clouds. Crude, but you get the idea. I smoothed the cloud image first with a light gaussian blur, then bumped a white layer, put the cloud layer over it and erased some.


It's a good way to get ideas and bits of natural-looking bumpiness.

Thanks for the tips Matera, I did see your image but something has happened to it now. It looked fantastic though - using clouds as bumpmaps gives a really natural look. I'll see if I can build this into my workflow.

Well I've been going round in circles with this and decided that bump mapping doesn't really fit in with the feel I'm going for - realistic almost ordnance survey kind of thing - so now I've got this (not quite happy with my text):

Nice work! It still doesn't look complete to me, though. I think what's missing is terrain--forest, desert, etc. It'd be interesting to see how the placement of forests, etc. works out. There was an interesting What If? post where Munroe works out the placement of forests, etc. of a rotated Earth. The placement of mountains and oceans seems to affect everything else--so I'd say, at the very least, you have a good first step!

Is that purple water I see?

It's 30 years of Purple Rain.

@Merrak: You are so right! I definitely need some forests and other terrain indicators in there - really appreciate the feedback my friend - thanks

@Wallace: Well originally purple was just the colour of the oceans in my map but now I think I will have purple water in my fictional world too

@Odinbc: Heheh awesome song - can't believe it's nearly 31 years old now - makes me feel old

Can I go swimming?

@Matera - yep be my guest - purple water is nice and warm

Anyway I've added some more features to my map, any feedback would be appreciated, thanks.

Looking better! It's hard to read the font across the land, though.

artloader: it's looking a lot more like an ordinary map now, good job. "broken land" sets my imagination going, i guess you won't want to tell too much about this before you have your story together, but can you drop a hint of what it is for the curious minded? just a little one?