Thank you for sharing all your favourite overland styles and giving me a little information about why they are your favourites. This was a very enlightening thread for me. I hope it was for you too.

This thread is to show the development of CC4 Overland, or as much as might be interesting to you. It's also an opportunity for you to express your thoughts on how it's going and make suggestions about improvements. Not all suggestions will necessarily be incorporated, but they will all be seriously considered.

So far, I've started with the textures. The initial Land texture I showed a glimpse of in the thread linked above ended up being too busy for it's own good, so it was dumbed down quite considerably to be more of a subtle blotchy background for the more important stuff - the terrain textures and symbols to come. There's also a draft ocean texture.

I usually start by doing all the textures first, but I've also been thinking about the mountains, hills, mesas, craters, etc. I needed good reference material and a way to keep my drawings consistent, so I used Blender to create models for myself.

There is a landscape add on available in Blender, but it doesn't provide the right options for me to get what I wanted, so I made my own set of geometry nodes. I know there are other Blender enthusiasts among you, so here are the nodes for the mountains if you want to have a go at making one of your own. I've scrunched them all up as close as I can so you can read them.

And here are the variables for the active mountain (outlined orange above). My spelling is still really bad. 'Aplitude' is meant to be 'Amplitude'.

Now begins the long process of hand drawing the mountains based on the models I've just made.

Please feel free to comment and make suggestions.

The interesting pattern emerging between this thread and the FB Group thread, is that preferences seem to be quite polarised. There are just as many people favouring HW as there are MS - mostly for the reasons you mentioned above. What one small group prefers, the other dislikes.

Prior to your comments, last night, I was working on a new land texture that was vaguely reminiscent of the HW Land Brown. Maybe (when I get the texture actually right), I should do a lighter version as well so people can chose how dark or light they like their maps?

I guess it also depends a lot on how individual mappers want to use their maps. Light is much more economical and much clearer when printing, but dark and contrasty is nice for impact when the map is used as a png or jpg.

Please continue to tell me your favourites. It all helps.

Thank you :)

I finished the cliffs and did a couple of ripples to mix in with the ridges. It's all handed over now to Ralf for final preparation - complete with the usual mistakes. I always seem to realise I did something wrong after I hand it over. So when you see things not quite working the way they are supposed to on the live stream it's quite often my fault, not Ralf's ;)

Larger version in my gallery here.

I've managed to get a few mesas, canyons and buttes together.

There aren't any rivers on "RIVERS Gorge" where you have the effect.

They are mostly on RIVERS.

With the really wide one being a gap between 3 polygons on the LAND sheet

If you want the rivers, or some of them, to have the effects on RIVERS Gorge you need to move those rivers to the RIVERS Gorge sheet.

This is all about sheets, not layers.