When I was ready to revisit the idea with the Mike Schley style, I took inspiration from Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps that combine Mike Schley's Overland style with elements from the Cities of Schley Isometric style. I kept thinking about gold and leprechauns. Who else covets gold? Dragons, of course! So this rather large overland map has the rainbow ending on a dragon's nest with her golden egg. (Originally it was going to be a gold dragon, but the red one popped on the screen better.)

I will post some zoomed-in versions in my galleries.

Although I was pleased overall, it doesn't have the impact that Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps do. I decided to make another attempt, this time with a much smaller area and going vertical. I'm much happier with this next attempt, although I need a ton more practice to get mine looking a fraction as nice as Ricko's.

I had a silly idea of doing a whimsical map or scene with leprechauns and pots of gold for St. Patrick's Day. But I didn't know how to incorporate a leprechaun, and that got me started down another path about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I started one in the Cities of Schley style, with the rainbow ending on an island with a chest of gold, but it was terrible. Scrapped that (but later went back to the concept) and ended up doing one in the more photorealistic Forest Trails style. The rainbow ends at a henge, landing on a green gemstone.

Then I did a tweak to it, having it end on a runestone instead:

Once I was happy with how the rainbow itself turned out, I was ready to revisit the project in the Mike Schley style......

I have been experimenting with three different approaches of taking a portion of a world designed in Fractal Terrains and then expanded upon in CC3+. All three of these experiments export the same view in FT.

The portion of the world I practiced on is an equatorial island nation called the Republic of Lumadair. The coastline is 10,099 miles long, with a length of about 2,000 miles long, depending where you measure from. (For reference, Australia has a mainland coastline (excluding islands) of 22,258 miles.)

Here's what it looks like from Fractal Terrains:

Approach 1: Parchment Maps

As previewed in a separate thread, this was my attempt to render it in the Parchment Maps style from the February annual using a technique that Ralf demonstrated in this video. It's scant on details -- the kind of map my players might find in old ruins somewhere giving them a clue where to continue their adventures.

Approach 2: Jerion Shading

This approach, also previewed in another thread, using the technique in this demo from Ralf to take the Jerion style and add beveling effects to some of the contours to create shading effects. I added cities and major towns (and a few magical places) but only named the major bodies of water and the two close continents.

Approach 3: Mike Schley Style

This approach exports the same land mass into the Schley style (which I only recently discovered was an option in FT), then added some contours brought in from the Jerion style. This is the slowest-to-render map I've ever done due to some techniques (and lessons learned) that I will describe later in this thread.

I just love the versality here -- I can have identical coastlines for all three maps, but they all have different looks and vibes.

Realized I didn't have any stains or scum, so added a bit. Really love how this template includes so many different effects options for adjusting the coloring.

Okay, I think I've done my final tweaks for my practice sewers.

I realized that my sewer pipes weren't actually doing anything, so I used end-pipes off of T junctures to allow the graywater they're carrying to be deposited into the sewer canals. Added a few more bridges over the canals because there were a few areas that were inaccessible to maintenance workers. Tightened up the border texture. Moved the water (Effluent 05) in the storm drain canals to a new water sheet to give it a slightly higher transparency. (Not sure if I did that effectively or not.) And I added a bit more drama to the tentacle action in the lower right.

Been plotting out how the waste management system in my major cities will work. From the age of 6 to 14, I grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing, so the ecology of outhouses isn't foreign to me. (What do you do when you fill one up? Dig another hole, and with enough time, the first one will be ready to be re-used again.) We sorted recycling long before curbside recycling existed (not that we had a curb -- we were a mile outside of our tiny town of 3,000 people). Compostables were sorted four ways: veggie peelings and ends for the rabbits in their elevated hutches, coffee grounds went to the worms that broke down the rabbit droppings below the hutches, egg shells were ground up and fed back to the chickens to give them calcium to strengthen their shells, and the rest went to the compost heap. Glass was sorted into separate bins for clear, green, and brown glass. Metals were sorted into separate bins for tin and aluminum. The rest was junk. Plastic wasn't as prevalent then and wasn't recyclable, and had to be taken to the dumps for landfill. So yeah, I've been thinking about the waste management issues for a medieval city. But also: humans and intelligent humanoids are nothing if not resourceful and inventive. In a fantasy world, what sort of burrowing or earth-eating creatures could be put to use to make tunnels easier than medieval humans could? What sort of debris-eating creatures like gelatinous cubes could be used to manage waste? No need in my world to dump untreated sludge back into rivers or oceans!