Hmph, is this really necessary to censure our messages here ? I'm trying to be constructive... So I'll post anyway what I was planning to post.
your an asshole.
Yes I am. And why should I be ashamed of it ? There are no use to flatter people here, if you tell them that something is good when it is not, you'll only torture your own eyes for the pleasure of the bad artist. Is it better to lie and make the person happy from his own nullity, or to admit that the map must be made for players and there eyes before all ?
I don't think this is rude to say that Mr. Farrare, with absolutely no offense intended, has no sense of observation. There are nearly no critics made against him, but look at the facts : he started to use noggit 10 months ago and yet he didn't made a lot of progress.
http://modcraft.io/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=4944He started with some kind of boring surburb where all the houses look the same with no distinction at all.
Is this the kind of place where you want to live ? Is Mr. Farrare's maps the kind of map you want to play in ?
If you look at more recents works, you'll see that the problem is still the same :
http://modcraft.io/download/file.php?id=1633 So let's just look at what his maps are : Big Buildings, roads textured with an intense opacity. (since it looks like he never tried to make the intensity lower) He did spawned some trees.. But those are so rare... Yet the only compliment I could make is that Mr. Farrare finally started to use relief.
Why did it took so much time to make relief ? Because nobody told him it was bad, and because of that his view never got better. Learning to watch properly is the first thing a mapper needs, let's take a random screenshot from what I'm working on and let's analyze it to explain how important it is.
Something quite random as you see. Someone who doesn't know about level design wouldn't see so much things here. He could tell you that there are "a road crossing grass, some houses, and some trees but mainly palms."
Though, if you only map those elements, your map will look pretty lame, because you're missing a lot of details that would make your map good.
First of all about textures : if you have a good visual memory, you can know from where all these textures come from, though here I use a lot of shading so this is not so obvious : The road comes from Scarlet Monastery, the dirt from Uldum, the grass comes from the Valley of the four winds and from the Howling Fjord. The road has a border of dirt that is the finest you can make in WoW, and there are a few dirt that is on the road, but is hard to see. Though, if it wasn't here you would think that it is extremely repetitive. Moreover, the borders aren't going directly forward, it does some kind of zigzags. For the grass as well, you can see that there are lot of fine features of the fjord texture allowing the grass to look more natural and not repetitive.
Notice also the fact that there is a little bit of relief on the grass, but the road is still flat.
Now about the objects, we also need to be precise. The two houses are human houses from the norfendre, there are not so much of human objects details here, except some fishs in front of one house, with a boot and a teddy murloc with mosquitoes, a bark, two crates and a barrel in the corner of the door, and some cloths on a rope with a ladder next to it. ( And seeing that this place looks quite humid, you can dedice that its inhabitants are dumb ). You can see in the distance a door with stairs. There are not easy to see from here. There is also a bit of a defensive tower and a cannon, but it's normal for you not too guess here.
About the trees : The big trees are in fact reskined Stranglethorn trees with bluest leaves and a druid trunk textures instead of the old one. (Which is also made bluer, and daker) The palm trees come from Uldum, the textures were recolored, though they are much more smaller than in Uldum, and they are always inclined : I used two kind of those, a thin palm, and a fatter one.
The way trees are put has its own rule too : Always a group of at least two palms, except for small corners, no tree must have the same scale or the same inclinaison, thin and fat palms must alternate as much as possible, etc... And there are always a little bush from Krasarang Wilds at the bottom of it, and sometimes little mosquitoes in the bush. (They are only visible when you're close, so you can't see them on the screen, unfortunately)
If your eyes are good, you should have already noticed from the begining that there are no grounds effects yet.
I could still talk about much more things, though, the point was only to show you that they are a lot of points to consider.
