Thread: Big Castle

Thanks Bogie.

Coming along great. Love going back over these posts to see the progress.

My northeast tower doesn't look very good here (I haven't started to add sunlight to the roof though - and that will help). I think I will change the northeast walkway to run into the centre of the main roof, over the smaller turrets. I wonder if I should also taper them at each end.

I think it looks really cool so far. You really have come a long way from your first drawing.
As you said, you should definitely lighten things up a bit around that northeast tower so we can see all the great details.

Good luck & great work so far!

The northeast tower is not working at all. I'll have to remove the moat and rocky base; hopefully I will be able to keep the tower roof. I tried to do shadows under the walkways but I didn't do a very good job. I feel like these maps are getting worse and worse! That's because I started with the ones where I had a strong mental concept, leaving these ones for later. Dear oh dear.

IMHO you should add some degree of transparency to the wakways shadow, more in the area near the tower (because the walkway is more separated from the ground in that zone). Also the shadow on the forest below is too dark and crisp. The sun will not cast a shadow so defined unless the object was only a couple of meters above the trees.

Good advice. Ta. Will fix that tomorrow.

This is an experiment to see if I can get away with re-using a map I made last year and insert it into the keep ground floor. Obviously this would need a bit more work. At least it fits.



Also here is the bridge again with the forest background quickly swapped out for some tropical water, for an encounter I am running soon. I just googled 'water map cartography' or something like this and found a low-resolution version of a map by Torstan, posted on these very forums (the larger proper version is available in an excellent-looking pirate ship map pack I believe). Because I was in a rush and the map is only for my own home campaign, I grabbed the thumbnail, blew it up, sharpened it and added some noise so it didn't look too stretched, made the colours more tropical, and pressed save. It worked out ok, which is good as I had intended all these castle map segments to be modular.

Love the railings on the balcony of the 1st pic. and the stairs, well done. I know you said it was from another map, but I wasnt around then so rep for that.

As far as this total project, wow, I can only imagine what your desk, walls, ceiling most look like to keep all this organized, sketches, printouts everywhere?