RIVERS: Tips & Tricks | Inkarnate Stream

hello everyone guess what it's live stream day and today we're going to be covering all those nice juicy tips and tricks on how to create rivers on your fantasy world maps now if you want to follow along on today's stream go ahead and click that link that I got there in the chat for you you're following Along on YouTube you'll find that in the video description let's get cracking all right so first when you're working on your Rivers it's best to have all your terrain done first because rivers are going to interact with the terrain okay so if you start making your Rivers like in the beginning of the map making process you're going to have a hard time so always make your terrain first then you can move on to your Rivers okay let's talk about where rivers start and where they end this is kind of a no-brainer rivers start in the mountains basically that's going to be snow melt and rainfall that collects up in the mountains generally uh lakes that are formed in the mountains and those are referred to as the headwaters Where the River starts Rivers will then travel along the terrain along the land going downhill or towards the ocean where its final destination is the ocean okay so starts in the mountains ends in the ocean so not complex right now I'll just quickly make one quick Little River so you can get a feel for it with the path tool and the reason why I mentioned the terrain is because you want the river to interact with so I'm trying to avoid those Hills and then make my way out to the ocean okay now there are multiple what's really cool about rivers is that you can have what are called tributaries which means they are rivers or waterways that basically Connect into another River or another body of water like a lake so in other words there might be one River here and it connects into this one making this River larger get adding more flow as it goes out towards the ocean so those are referred to as tributaries okay now I want to mention also something about do rivers split this is kind of a Hot Topic the River Police like to clamp down on this a little bit but Rivers do split and it's a process referred to as River by Fury by Fury occasion okay River by furication is when a what piece of the river breaks off and creates what's referred to as a distributary okay so this River will split and it will go off elsewhere this is referred to as a distributary okay so Rivers do split so and it's called River by purification super interesting go check it out now that we've gone through those kind of simple things let's go on with the next one let's talk about scale because some people I know can get a little confused about how is it that I how should I make my Rivers okay so let's go zoom in over here let's talk about scale this one's important so basically the more zoomed in you are if your fantasy map world map is a little bit larger and that means the scale is the mountains are a little bit bigger the stamps are a little bit bigger you can show more of the Meandering now this is an artistic Choice by the way because realism is really a stylistic choice that you as a map maker need to decide to make okay if you want more realism then you're going to factor in scale okay so now if you're not worried about hyper realism or you're trying to achieve realism because it's a fantasy map right that's entirely your decision if you're not worried about hyper realism then it's okay to make your Rivers have some very obvious looking Meandering see how this river right here shows some very large meanders okay now if you were doing a more realistic River it probably wouldn't look like that it probably looks something more like this and the reason why is because if you're scaled far out away from um the further out you can see then then you're not going to see these meanders quite as much okay because you're scaled way further out you're way further away as the viewer so your rivers are going to look more like this where the meanders are a little less obvious okay they're not gonna be super huge and windy like you see in the example above they're going to be a little little more straighter but not necessarily straight because you still want to have some meanders in there okay so that's when you're working with scale okay now there is a problem that comes often I've noticed with some people when they try to do um using what's called mask effects so let me make a river normally you would make a river with a subtract mode of the Mask tool and then whatever size brush that you want so let me go ahead and just make a river here okay and I'm using the subtract mode of the Mask tool to do this and I kind of goofed up there I kind of put it behind the that Hill there okay now if I turn on my mask effects which by the way you're gonna want to use mask effects are really really helpful so I'll enable them and turn them on and we're going to encounter a really interesting issue which I'm sure many of you have when putting together um you know rivers with mask effects is that the river might be too big right it might be too big for it to to show The Mask effects kind of make it look weird so we'll turn the mask effects on and you can see what I'm talking about when I look at this river right here it just turns into this whitish color because my mask effects are so thick and I have different types of mask effects when you're dealing with this problem you have a couple routes that you can check the most obvious one is just to change the mask effects so that that way there's no stroke or whatever and it won't kind of create this weird glow around it that's one thing that you can do now if that's still not big enough if that's still not if that's still too small hey raid hey thank you fate of the dice first time chatter welcome by the way and other first time Chatters morning hello both of you all of you I'm sorry that I missed you there in the chat but welcome so now if it's still not small enough if they're still too big then the next thing you can use is using the path tool because the path tool is super helpful let me turn on the mask effects again real quick turn that stroke back on give it a second to load mask effects will generally cause your machine to lag a little bit depending on the editing resolution that you're in but one way to resolve some of that lag is to Simply turn off your mask Effects by just clicking the enable mask effects button there and it will turn those off and that way you'll probably have less lag so definitely do that let's talk about using paths to make your Rivers right here now the way that I go about making rivers with a path is not complex first let's talk about the blend mode you want to use and the color you want to use what I like to use is change the blend mode to Hue and then this is the hex code 094097 okay so to get that specific blue but you can change the color of that path anytime you want but let me select the path and show you how much smaller you can get I can really scale it down now just you know if you're at such a if your map is so huge normally you won't even see a river so you don't have to add them but if you need want to show them because remember it's a fantasy map it's a representation following reality or not at least Earth physics isn't entirely a decision that you as the Cartographer has to make but if you are struggling with having your Rivers not be thin enough you can just use the path tool and just change that with you can make them really big you can make them really small that's up to you entirely up to you okay so those are really the easiest way to go about doing that if you're just struggling with the mask effects because I know that you use mask effects to make the landscape pop out more and so it's really helpful to use the path if you're struggling with the proper width okay let's take a step back a little bit remember I talked about tributaries a tributary let's go ahead and turn off my mask effects let me just show how you would go about dealing with a tributary so a tributary starts in the mountains and it meanders into a lake or Another River so if I have perhaps a river right here and it goes out to here then I could throw in Another River here that would be a tributary that breaks off and connects into this other River that's a tributary not to be confused with a distributary which would be this right here right it branches off from the main route and creates another Branch River by purification okay well hey that's really as simple as it is I don't have a lot of any more information than that you just remember where it starts in the mountains ends in the ocean two you want to make sure that you decide the scale if you want it to be more realistic because a world map is going to be at a different scale than say a battle map then use a river that doesn't show the massive Meandering right instead show small little tiny meanders so you can keep to scale if you're not worried about realism then you can show those nice large windy meanders and don't forget you can use the path tool because remember the mask tool only goes subtract only goes to one but with the paths you can make it so much smaller okay so hey that's it super short video only 10 minutes long but it wasn't really that complex it's super easy to do rivers and of course if you ever have a hard time you should totally totally totally join our Discord and you know what our mentors if you ping them they will totally help you out you can also just ping me my T and I will gladly help you out quick question here by Dragon challenge should a lake be at the starting point in the mountains um yes but you know what because it's really hard to show a lake in the mountains I mean you totally can it's up to you how realistic you want to go but you could totally use the path tool because remember if you use um if you use the uh the subtract mode of the mass tool you'll end up with a problem you can't actually make a path you can't actually use the subtract mode on so let me just show you real quick I would use a path tool if you wanted to show like a river going connecting in like this like that because that way you could actually put a path on top of a mountain well you cannot remove it I mean you'd have to flatten the mountain to the FG layer which is the layer that the mountains are on and then you could use the subtract mode on top of that but with the mask effects that would look really bogus so instead totally use the path tool when you're trying to show that there's some Headwaters in the mountains going down the mountain itself if you want to even show that you don't have to that's an artistic choice that you need to make again if this was a more hyper realistic map you wouldn't even see the rivers you wouldn't even see the Lakes because it's just so far scaled out okay all right any other questions before we take off because that one's pretty easy the path tool again that's the trick use your path tool and the Hue blend mode because if you don't use the Hue blend mode then it probably won't interact properly with whatever the textures are on the layers that you have okay all right hey thank you so much I'm looking forward to seeing you all again in two weeks remember we're staying on our summer schedule 9 A.M PST our next one is going to be jungle Forts and then the last one on the last uh day last Wednesday of the week I believe is going to be how to make realistic coastlines alright thank you so much everyone I will see you all again in two weeks please stay safe and healthy and merry map making thank you

Channel: Inkarnate

Views: 2,619

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Id: 4WufsrMDtPA

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023