City

[Katto]

Hello Cartographers,

here is my attempt to follow Pyrandon's "Medieval Town Map", which I like very much. The map was created in Photoshop, the city with the RPG City Generator and the labeling was done with Illustrator. I spend much time to create "Elmswood" and stared a lot of time at it, but I think something is wrong or missing. Could you please help me?
In the future I think I will add a legend to the right expanding the canvas.

btw: Does it mean "Elmwood" or "Elmswood"? I just had a nightmare and I am german...

[Gandwarf]

It looks pretty sweet I think! I like the general layout, the fields, the little walls, the river, roads and hilly terrain.

Some criticsm:

- Overall it's a pretty dark map.
- The houses don't cut it for me. The roofs don't look convincing.
- Labeling is very dark, I would go with a light color, maybe even white!
- Things you might want to add: some dirt squares, a watermill near the river, some sandy beaches, maybe some chimneys or towers on top of the houses,
- I would expect more houses within the walls, it's safer there.
- Lots of houses are not connected to the roads. I would expect thinner dirt paths leading from the front door to the larger roads.

A question: why does the wall have so many holes in it?

Anyway, it's really looking pretty good already!

[Ascension]

Not too shabby, pretty good in fact.

[Immolate]

My advise is to start adding subtlety to the map. Try setting various layers to 75% opacity (or perhaps less in the case of the labels) and see how it appeals to you. Look at colors with an eye toward how they interact with other colors near them. I'm colorblind, so when I see color issues, they either aren't there or they are there pretty dramatically. The color of some of the larger labels puts me off for some reason.

I think it's a lovely map and with some fine tuning can become a solid piece of work.

[Steel General]

Coming along nicely...

[Katto]

I've displayed the picture on a different monitor this day and was very astonished, that the picture was really dark as Gandwarf mentioned. I will have to fix that.
That style is a bit abstract, so I will not add much details like chimneys etc, but I will play around with different roof textures and colors of the labels.
The challenge for me was to make the best of a computer generated city, that's why I posted both pictures.
@Gandwarf: It is a setting in the map generator to create an unfinished city wall. There it is a fun map with no background it leaves enough space for your own imagination. I immediately thought of german bureaucracy: The town council wanted a wall, spent a lot a money to build it and realizing at the end when it is nearly done, that two people doesn't want to sell their houses to get it finished. Yes, it's a bureaucracy campaign map!

[Coyotemax]

lol, nice explanation

(i imagine some suspicious housefires in the near future, lol)

[zenram]

Wow, nice map!!!

[Midgardsormr]

Very nice. Much better than my attempt at the Eneini style. You might make the towers' shadows longer than the wall shadow to indicate that they are taller than the wall. Also, look for Ascension's motion blur shadow technique that fills up the holes at the corners of the structures. I think he described it in the Oasis thread.

I would expect to see evidence of activity near the river. Since that's looks like the community's only water source, there should be trails leading to it from a variety of places.

Either Elmwood or Elmswood work in English.

[Katto]

Thanks for all the good comments. I will post an update soon.