Village: Four Oaks
Four Oaks is a small village situated in a forest in my D&D campaign. A druid living nearby has convinced the inhabitants that clearing trees would be unwise, hence the small fields. The village was named after the four large oak trees in the middle of a clearing in the forest, one of which was destroyed in a recent lightning strike.
The map was made in Xara Xtreme, so it's all vector. I made the map mainly to experiment with rpgmapmaker's handdrawn buildings and trees. (see here) I traced his drawings and added a bump map to get the proper shading (this way I can change the direction of the lighting on the fly, and the shading automatically adapts when the buildings are rotated). I made four colour variants of each building and placed them by hand.
The trees gave me (or rather, Xtreme) some headaches. These were also traced, but the resulting vector shapes were rather complicated. As there are 4138 trees on the map, it made Xtreme somewhat sluggish (still workable though). If I had manually drawn the tree shapes, they would have had at most a quarter of the number of nodes they have now, thus giving much better performance. I didn't have the time to create bump maps for the trees, maybe some other day. Placing the trees was a matter of creating a brush consisting of 50 different trees (maximum Xtreme allows), with some randomizing in colour, scale, rotation and placement (more or less like the Big Lazy City method, see this thread). I then drew a few squiggly lines, applied the brush and converted these to seperate shapes. All that was left was a bit of cleaning up, removing trees overlapping fields, buildings and roads.
There is still enough work left on this map. I need to add more fences and walls, get some variation in the fields, and make a new label, among other things.
Comments are welcome!
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