This is just a random background, and not really finished. Softwares used were: blender, texturemaker, arbaro, photoshop, and pixia.
(http://home.att.net/~zolgnar/gmap3t.png)
Looks great! No crits I can think of right now
Unless the house is supposed to be on the minature side, it looks as if the tall trees are a bit on the big side, maybe. Also, the leaves that are on some of the tress seem too big.
All in all, it looks pretty great, though!
thanks, and yeah, i made that tree on the left way too big, i will have to watch the scale issues closely as it gets more complex.
Reminds me of warcraft. Excellent.
Congrats. It's great.
But water is not usually crystal-clear from the air, it's dark blue.
with shallow water, especially from such a height, the bottom of it should really show through, so id suggest making the water a lot murkier, other than that its nice.
thanks for the crits, however, if it was crystal clear, you would see only the specularity, and the stones beneath it. Ã, it is a shade or two too light, but water gets its blue color from reflecting the sky, so the color of water depends somewhat on the weather. Ã, the rule is, make it a shade darker than the sky it is reflecting. Ã, choppier means less reflective and darker, and other factors in coloration, are, algae, mud, and minerals. ( such as in turqoise colored glacial water ) i will do some more work on it, mostly adding reeds, lily pads, and reflections.
to the comment that just got posted, good point,.... i'll try some variations.
I don't like how the ground appears to have a grid pattern like starcraft or warcraft.
Since you're using warcraft etc, there's no reason you can't have natural (non zig zagging) edges.
Also, the water patterns look like they are a scale of about 50 miles across...while the house shows a completely different scale.
All of the water in the rivers and lakes are equally stagnant
agree with stuh's second point - if you cover up the house and trees, it's easy to imagine that you're in a plane flying 10,000 feet above the amazon or something, and those 'skinny' rivers would - up close - be much much much bigger. And then there's that itty little house that throws the perspective off, which seems to suggest that the river is no wider than the door.
I love the image as a whole; I think the style is fantastic. The river just looks like it needs to be a bit wider, since I can't remember the last time I saw a house with a river no wider than the front door that ran nearly the whole way around the house... :)
No, don't change the water, it's beautiful! Throw reality out the window for this one - the aesthetics are more important, and that water is GORGEOUS. For me, it really makes the picture. I'd love to play a game with that gorgeous water but if it looks any more realistic, it might start to look too dull.
The tree on the left is the only thing that does seem really out of place, but even the really tall trees don't bother me. It looks nice, forget reality. Pretty!
thanks for the comments. i tried to improve some things with this latest version. sorry about the light being on the wrong side of the trees,...i totally spaced that.
(http://home.att.net/~zolgnar/bgcomp2.png)
It is a very nice BG, there's one little thing bugging me: the edge of the rivers and ponds (where the water meets the yellow stones) is blurry, making it look like they are filled with blue fluffy mist, instead of water.
Love the texture on the ground though.
How did you make this image?
yes, the waters edge is a mistake, i forgot to add the water lines along the edge.Ã, you can see they are in the first one though.Ã, i made it by doing a few different things,....
I started by making several textures in texturemaker, making them into isometric textures with the same program, then setting those textures as patterns in photoshop.Ã, then, i made a solid black and white map of my river, to make selection of the river area easier, and moved that to a hidden layer.Ã, I then used the wand select tool, and the pattern stamp tool to layer in my terrain, and water, and the dodge and burn tool to give it some variation.Ã, the rocks and the trees, were constructed in 3D in blender, and a program called arbaro, and then rendered, with an alpha channel, in blender, as pngs.Ã, then i opened those in photoshop, and used the move tool to drop them into my background, using constrained scaling to get them the right size.Ã, The house I painted in pixia, and applied in basically the same way.Ã, I think I might try rendering some 3D water too, and see how that looks.Ã, of note, all the photoshop stuff can be done in GIMP as well, and you don't have to use patterns, you can also use the clone stamp tool.
<edit> oh, and the bridge, i made and rendered in blender, same as the rocks and trees. ( except for the tall trees which i made in arbaro, an open source tree maker )
When the water is as reflective as you made it, there should be a clear reflection of the bridge. The closer the thing, that is reflected the clearer ist the reflection.
After looking at a few photos from the internet it seems clear to me the the colour of the reflecting water should look more homogenous because it reflects the average colour of the sky. Where the water is shadowed the ground should be visible.
I have looked at it for a while now and can I just say the ground is absolutely beautiful.
I think you should seriously consider removing all little rivers of water and turning it into one big lake perhaps.
Just my 2 cents.
Good stuff, makes me wanna build a golf course on it....