Still kicking myself over that $50 river map brush set I bought 3 years ago

I picked up this digital brush pack that promised realistic river textures, but all the tributaries looked like cracked pavement no matter how I tweaked the settings. Wasted an entire weekend trying to blend them into my world map before giving up and going back to hand drawing. Anyone else fall for a map tool that just did not deliver?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_murphy361mo ago

The thing nobody talks about with those brush sets is how they only look good at one specific zoom level. At 100% it looks like a weird mess, but if you scale it way down it somehow looks passable. I realized most of the promo images are probably shown at like 25% size or something. Your "cracked pavement" description is dead on though, I had a forest brush do the same thing where every tree looked like a mold spot until I zoomed way out. Map making tools are famous for lying about what they can actually do in real projects.

umab351mo ago

That actually explains a lot about why those promo maps always look so different when you try to recreate them yourself. Had a similar thing happen with a city block brush where you had to zoom out so far it looked like a toy town before it made any sense.