Some more experimentation. I’m generally happy with it but there are some things I’m dissatisfied with.
- Mountains, I’m mostly happy. A little artifacting still visible, but applying a bit more (or a different?) displacement map to it could solve that.
- Hills (the brownish-green bits) could do with a bit more breaking up. The hills use the same base turbulent noise pattern as the mountains so they’ll be consistent in area covered, but I could use different noise and draw the affected regions by hand (which might give me better interaction and merging with the mountains). I think I should adjust the resolution of the noise, so the hills have more breaks. A bunch of options to consider here.
- Forests… eh, I screwed it up a bit. My colors are off a bit and the bump map is weak. I can identify a few places that should improve this, though.
- Use different turbulent noise than the mountains and hills (whether or not they use the same noise or different noise, the forest needs to use different noise). As it is I’ve got hilly areas at all the ‘light colored’ areas of the forest, and that really doesn’t look right.
- I picked pretty complete areas of forest. I think it looks better when it’s a little more scattered, as in my previous maps.
- Pay attention when doing the bump maps and coloring, and don’t screw up on the channel creation and selection. The two interacted… poorly.
- Rivers are coming. I think I should probably start with the rivers narrower. I’m getting a handle on having them interact with the other elements (forests and hills and whatnot), though I need to work some more on the terrain interactions. If you look closely there is reason to send the River Police after me.
- I should maybe look into paths for the rivers instead of going raster with them (it could make for some other useful tricks later), but I’ll leave that for later.
- Grass (texture on land) I’m pretty happy with. It looks reasonably ‘grassish’ and the color variation suits.
- Waves (texture on water) isn’t bad, but could be improved. I shouldn’t have used the same texture as on the land. I suspect that if I take the noise (desaturated plasma) and displace it using itself for the displacement map it may do what I want.
All in all I think I’m still improving, and as long as that happens I’m satisfied.
Except for the damn forests. Gah.