I decided with this one to create JPGs of every step of the way to document the process. I'm only one step two (rivers) and I am already seeking input from the Cartography Hive Mind.

I decided to copy my land over from when I had rendered it in the Fractal Parchment World style last month. That style has the rivers as a cutout, but because Birdseye Continental has the rivers on the same sheet as the oceans, they both have a similar effect in that you can overdraw the rivers past the coastline without it looking funny.

But first I made a copy of that FCW, simplifying it by removing unused sheets and layers, changing the fills to solid colors instead of fills, and then deleting all of the fills. That way when I copy the landmass into new FCW files, it minimizes what it brings in and I won't have a lot of extraneous or confusing fills and sheets and layers that I won't need or want.

Here's what that simplified map looks like:

So I created my new Birdseye Continental map at around 6,000 x 4,000 miles, changed the map size to be 24,960 x 12,495 miles, added the Sea over the green land, and then copied over the land mass from my little template. Changed my land to be a magenta cutout on the Waters (All) sheet. So far, so good.

Then I copied in the rivers and used the Change Like Draw Tool function to change the rivers to the Birdseye Continental style. And that brings up my aesthetic question for all y'all. The rivers in Fractal Parchment Worlds have a default width of 24. (!!!) The default width in Birdseye is 3.

To my mind, 24 is too wide for this map, but what do you think about how 3 looks? Should I bump it up a little or leave as is -- or even delete rivers that would be too small to represent on a 25,000 mile wide map?

For perspective, there is only one river in our world that gets up to 24 miles wide (the Amazon), and only eight that are three or more miles wide: Congo (15), Yangtze (8), Mississippi (7), Paraná (6), Mekong (5), Brahmaputra (4), and Ganges (3).

I know this is supposed to only be the major rivers, and having this many rivers that are 3+ miles wide is rather pushing it. Even so, I'm thinking about (a) leaving them all in, and (b) keeping most of them at 3, while bumping up a few of the really major rivers of this world, but I am very open to everyone's thoughts. I will add this last map to my galleries if you want to be able to zoom in a bit.

Oh, the biggest change is that Ricko's image didn't have sheet effects turned on. I turned them on before making a JPG.

Added some more. Only put in Lumadair's capital city and a few notable landmarks, not the other cities that were in previous versions of this map. Do you think the font size for my labels for cities/landmarks is too small?

I'm glad Sue chose to use a default font that can do accent marks because when I do the global map, there are a lot of accent marks. Mostly in names derived from Elvish, because Elves are fancy that way, like the French.

This map is 6,109 miles wide. I used the technique that Ralf showed of creating a 1000 x 800 map so that symbols would default to the scale of 1, and then resized it. I assume I should do the same when I start my global map, which is 25,000 miles wide.

Reworking the mountains, replacing all of the ridges and ripples so they flow together better to my eye.

Here are a few different tweaks. Thoughts?

Version 1

For the snow-capped mountain, I replaced the scorched alpine fill with a tundra fill, and redrew the snow to be tighter around the snowy ridges. Also added an ice fill between the ridges. I should probably add some ripples onto the tundra terrain but should they be snowy or arid?

Version 2

All of the changes in #1, but I drew a hill polygon around the mountain. Not so sure about this one.

Version 3

All of the changes in #1, without the hill in #2, but I lightened the tundra using ADJUST HUE/SATURATION effect (Lightness +50%)

Version 4

Same as #3, but I added the Uneven Ground texture over the mountain.

Before attempting to do my entire Earth-sized world in the new Birdseye Continental style, I wanted to practice on a smaller bit of land, the tried-and-true Republic of Lumadair. I find it helpful to have the exact same FT export used for so many different styles -- I can toggle through JPGs of all of them while the coastlines remain identical, for better comparison.

I won't have time to do more work on it for several more hours (it's the start of my workday here on the Pacific coast), but I figured in the meantime I would seek feedback on my progress so far.

First, for perspective: Lumadair is in an equatorial climate. Very equatorial. Fractal Terrains tells me that the equator runs right through the middle of it. The latitude runs from -10 degrees on the southern side to +10 degrees on the northern side. Here it is circled on a map of my campaign world:

(After doing some terraforming to turn some landlocked great lakes into seas connected to the oceans, I made some adjustments to how it's viewed. I discovered that rotating the longitude perspective by 90 degrees allowed the main landmasses to all appear on the map without wrapping around. And I flipped it because I liked how it looked better that way, so FT will tell you that the top of the map has negative latitude numbers, with positive ones on the bottom half, but since that's not displayed, it's easy enough for me to mentally adjust.)

There are more images of Lumadair in my galleries if you want to see the terrain and symbols in other formats.

Here is Lumadair so far in Birdseye Continental. Haven't drawn most of the forests yet, nor water depths. I want to redo all of the mountain ridges and ripples to make them fit together a little better, and also be slightly less linear, even though they should still more or less be going in the same direction.

Here are the mountains in northeast corner up close. I tried to use varicolor green ridges to show lower mountains covered with trees, but I'm not sure how well that worked. I might experiment with adding a chameleon or drawn hill beneath them to give them more height. The snowy part is for a mountain that is so high that it is perpetually snow-covered. I think it's the third highest on my campaign world? I think the highest is about 30,000 feet and this one is around 25,000 feet. But I think I want to adjust the snow terrain to be a little tighter to the snowcapped ridges. Thoughts?

I do like how the swamp turned out. The main rivers have a default width of 3, but I added more branches with widths of 2 and 1. (This swamp map also shows an experimentation of putting a ridge on a chameleon hill.)