Celestia Forums

Here's the world map that I'm working on. The realistic colors were cloned in the gimp from a 2k realistic earth texture. What do you think about the placement of the biomes? How should I blend the boundaries between the biomes?

http://www.rit.edu/~bjr5096/worldbuilding/world.html

Is it the Earth millions of years ago?Or is a new planet?

Brendan wrote:Here's the world map that I'm working on. The realistic colors were cloned in the gimp from a 2k realistic earth texture. What do you think about the placement of the biomes? How should I blend the boundaries between the biomes?

http://www.rit.edu/~bjr5096/worldbuilding/world.html

danielj wrote:Is it the Earth millions of years ago?Or is a new planet?

It's a new planet.

Brendan

Brendan wrote:How should I blend the boundaries between the biomes?

Do you mean how technically, or how aestethically?

-rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:

Brendan wrote:How should I blend the boundaries between the biomes?

Do you mean how technically, or how aestethically?

-rthorvald

Would smudging the boundaries work? Should there only be a narrow smudged region? My printed world map of the earth shows the boundaries like this.

Brendan

If you're using Photoshop, the clone stamp tool with a fuzzy brush will work perfectly. And since you're doing this kind of thing, you should take a look at the planet map tutorial on my site. Good luck with the map.

Brendan wrote:Would smudging the boundaries work?

I don?t think smudging works very well, at least not if you get close to the surface: the result can easily look a bit dirty. As diabloblanco17 suggested, the clone stamp tool is much better, though i don?t know if the Gimp has that.

You can achieve much the same effect by hand: sample bits of the map and overlay with transparency at the border regions. If you do that several times, with different levels of transparency, you will get a smooth transition with much sharper detail than is possible with the smudge tool.

Brendan wrote:Should there only be a narrow smudged region?

Maybe vary that a little, following the contours of the landscape?

-rthorvald

Thanks, the gimp has a clone tool, which was what I used to color the map. I'll try your suggestions when I get home from university.

Brendan

I used the clone tool in the gimp with various brushes and varying levels of transparency to blend in the borders. The new map is shown above now.

Brendan

Much better (I assume; it's been almost two months since I saw the last map), though it's still completely unrealistic. Stop blending the biomes along simple lines and make things patchier. Look at the boundaries between biomes on the Earth map you're working from and try to emulate those.

I worked on the map some more with the new one being above. The previous version is under the new one on this page. http://www.rit.edu/~bjr5096/worldbuilding/world.html

Brendan