Thread: Fjord WIP

No higher res version sorry, the pixel junk is just something I enjoy doing, mainly for myself...sorta like knowing something someone else doesn't. Kinda lame I guess, but in high school I used to put subliminals in my art so at least I don't do that anymore. I would like to blow it up so that more detail can be shown more clearly like in this months challenge, not sure how to go about that without distortion. Then of course there's the file size stuff that I really try to stay under. Would be cool to do this in a bunch of separate encounter maps. Anywho, thanks was hoping I wasn't just spinning my wheels because since I still have the original clouds layer, then enlarged it 400% to do the mountains, theoretically I can do 2 additional maps in every direction out from the city...sort of like building a region from smaller city-sized maps.

Let me put it this way: I can almost guarantee that this map(s) is going to find its way into a campaign I run eventually. The only thing I see is that the shadows still indicate that the walls are way shorter than the buildings. Unless those interior walls are intended to be fence-sized?

Indeed they are, I have 3 different size walls: a 1-pixel wall that is about fence high, mainly for yards n stuff; a 3-pixel wall meant to be about 10 feet high and 6 feet thick meant to separate the different classes; and a 5-pixel wall meant to be the main defensive wall. I ran 4 sets of motion blur for the various buildings and walls: 1 story buildings and 3-pixel walls got a blur of 5 (copied 2 times, merged onto a white layer, turned up the contrast, deleted the white, then 1 pixel gaussian blur); 2 story buildings and main walls got a motion blur of 10, 3 story = 15, and 4 story = 20...the 1-pixel walls just got a drop shadow of 1 pixel size and distance. This gives me various lengths of shadow in theory but in looking it can be hard to tell so maybe in the future I'll bump up those numbers for the motion blur.

Ascension - do you actually draw the map elements (boats, tents, etc.) at this size, or do your resize them down from larger drawings?

-Rob A>

I make a new document and draw a black shape on a transparent background then turn it into a brush. I usually draw things at 1 pixel = 1 foot for these types of city maps then scale the brush down if I need to. For example, my largest building is the castle, I drew it out as a bunch of black squares and circles then copied it into my map and applied pattern and color overlays and then beveled 'em to get the pitched roofs. The cathedral is part of a set of brushes I made for myself and it is an 80 pixel wide black cross shape, some of the L shaped buildings are 61 pixel wide brushes scaled down to 30 to fit this particular scale of 1 pixel = 2 feet on this map. So, while I do not draw out each shape every time, I make a simple black brush so that I can reuse the shape as often as I want (got a lot of brushes piling up on me now). I also have preset layer styles that I made for myself as well with names like inns, walls, stone, roads, nobles, huts, etc. Of course this could get monotonous if I'm still using the same styles 100 maps from now Somewhere on the site I put up a lil gallery of some of the styles I use, on someone else's thread, but I suppose I could upload the whole set as well as the brushes into the resources section for those who use photoshop. But since everyone has there own style and scales vary, in the end it might not be all that useful so that's why I haven't done so yet. Myabe a mini tutorial on how I make the brushes and layer styles and combine shapes might be in order though.

Here's the next map, it goes directly north of the city. And for those wondering, the second image shows the whole region's topography to this point. I'll put in roads and stuff when I get the other sections' topography done. And yes, I know things don't line up perfectly and the colors are off a bit, I'm still backtracking on making everything exactly as the very first map and I've got everything figured out except for the snow layer. I did the trees here a bit slapdash as it was late and I was tired.

Snagged...