Welcome to Gaia! ::

I am a gigantic nerd. Part of this gigantic nerdery manifests itself as a penchant for freeform roleplay on IRC. Like Dungeons & Dragons without the dice, y'know.

Anyway, the place where I engage in this FFRP thing (#Broken_Dagger on StarChat) has a setting all of its own, with geography and so on. Because I am not only a gigantic nerd, but a gigantic nerd who likes things to make sense, I took it upon myself to draw together all the snippets of information on places and locations in this FFRP game's setting, combined with the rudimentary map already in existence, and make something new and awesome.

So, behold! Ye Olde Mappe! Rendered entirely in Photoshop, which involved lots of playing around with layers and filters and textures and layer masks and cool stuff like that.






Click on the images to get the big-huge version. Also, please note that I am not responsible for the slightly cliche or weird fantasy place-names. Blame the other players for those. I certainly do.

How was Heath country responded to Mr. Ledger's death
I feel like it looks really illustrated but if that's what you're going for coo coo
I think the little "folds" in the map could be better tho

Oooh. I love seeing beautiful technical drawings like this.
I think the aging looks pretty cool. It would look great in reproduction, me thinks.
The only thing is maybe show some wear on the edges in places... maybe some tears or a piece missing from the fold areas at the very edge. It would help the effect greatly.

Damn, what I'd give for a map like this of my own setting. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about its geography. Either way - fantastic work. A great resource for you and yours, I'm sure.

Layer blending effects in Photoshoppe, mostly. Each fold-line is first made using the Line tool, and a round, hard-edged brush with Shape Dynamics > Size Jitter set to about 50%, Scattering > Scatter (both axes) at about 70%, Brush Tip Shape > Spacing at about 80%, and Brush Opacity at about 60%.

Draw your crease-lines on a new layer above all the other layers using the Line Tool, and Stroke Path with Brush once or twice, using the above brush settings loaded with white. Duplicate the layer.

Top layer (which'll be the faded/lighter bit of the crease), set the layer blending properties to Master Opacity 80%, Layer Blending Mode to Luminosity.

For the layer below that (which'll be the darkened bit), hit Ctrl+I to invert the black and white; use the Gaussian Blur filter to blur the colour out a bunch, and set Layer Blending Mode to Soft Light. You might want to duplicate this layer a couple of times to get the right colour, especially round the edges of the map.

And that's about it, going from inspecting my .psd files to unravel what I did. biggrin

ah thank you so much.

I am a photoshop noob, it's sad to admit - I held out for years using Paintshop Pro because I could afford it. I actually only got Photoshop because it was a requirement for some job.

Layer effects are a very efficient alternative to the method I am used to using!