Ok. I think it's coming along pretty well. The main thing I would adjust if I was using it myself for a map is the hills. I would use effects and settings similar to those found in SS5, though I adjust those to make the bevel lighter again than it is in the template.

The HILL sheet uses polygons of "Solid 20", and my personal settings for the Bevel, Lighted sheet effect give the hill a highlight as well as a shadow. It's personal taste, of course, but I find the template setup makes the hills a little too dark for my liking.

These settings also use a lot more smoothing than you have in your template. It gets rid of the knife edge ridge which feels a bit unnatural for a relatively small hill - unless they are meant to be mountains.

Having sufficient edge fade on the hill after the bevel also helps to make the hill look like it's a rise in the ground, rather than something stuck down on top of it - a curve into the slope rather than a sharp line, or a line that hasn't been faded enough with a wide enough EFI. I increase mine from 10ft to 15ft, though it could be wider.

Oh yes, the hedge pieces are all rounded off at the end, which means the end happens whenever you stop. There isn't a round end on the first part of the hedge, but you can approach the gate from the other side.

I haven't done fences. They seem to be much less common in medieval times. I suppose its because making a wooden fence with wooden bars (no wires back then) would have been too time consuming when you have plenty of rocks lying around for a wall and a hedge grows without a problem. It's also because they don't work well with the same shadows as the walls and hedges, so I would need yet another sheet just for the fences.

But I can make a gate symbol.

Round-ended hedge pieces

@JimP that's a good idea :)

Did someone let the were-rabbit out again?

Ok, so they're all just stones, and we are looking down on them, but how do they look?

I also adjusted the heather, since it was looking like colour patches rather than actual plants. The upshot of that is that they don't look like quite such a homogenous mass as is natural on a moorland, but I guess I prefer them this way to the way they were.

On the Bevel, Lighted it is possible to make the bevel concave by increasing the value of the Slope Curve.

With a bit of fiddling you can reverse the shading to show the effect of a hollow by unchecking the Global Sun Direction and setting the Azimuth to 180 degrees from the global sun settings.

With the ordinary Bevel, you can't make the curve concave, but you can reverse the shading by checking the Invert Colors box. That would make the polygon appear to be sunken instead of raised.

A bit like this (though these are very raw at the moment and need some roughing up)

Not much further, but there's some work to make the various shades of white look ok with each other.

Thank you! :)

I think the elven houses are my favourite at the moment, though I did have a huge amount of fun with a slightly over-exuberant volcano this afternoon.

I quite like the idea of Brightlands.

Open to more suggestions...

Hi everyone! :D

Tomorrow, Ralf will be going festive with a Live Mapping session using the Winter Village style to create a nice little map for the holidays.❄️☃️

Come join us live on Youtube and join in the fun here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fud5YoQhXAs

Or watch it here on the forum later if you miss the show.

All are welcome :)

@Wyvern - Thank you :) I did two volcanoes the end, and three versions of each one so you could have an active volcano setting without half the map being covered in ash clouds. Since this isn't going to be a huge set I think I might have overdone it at that.

@Quenten and @thehawk - Thank you :)

Ok, I admit I have been fascinated by Etna just recently, and I've also been a long-term fan of Kilauea's current Helama'uma'u crater eruption at the summit. I check the webcams every evening when dawn breaks in Hawai'i and the lava glows red for real in the low light. Though recordings of the Fissure 8 eruption in 2018 (recently given it's official new name of "Ahu‘aila‘au") are more impressive than the current eruption.

@Autumn Getty - I come from a place where there are large tracts of lowland heath not far to the east (since we don't have any mountains in Dorset), so purple is very natural for me, but you can probably do different colours by leaving that fill out and adjusting the background colours to suit :) Colour theory is fascinating, but not entirely necessary for mapping ;) And never be afraid to say what you think, even if you didn't find a thread until late on. A conversation isn't complete if there is anyone who wants to speak but doesn't, and anyway... I find your contributions interesting. Having them gives the thread a more balanced feel - all views are welcome :)