Superhero City Map

[Coyotemax]

And now for something completely different! (well, for me)... I've been a bit quiet as of late on the site, there's lots of complicated things going on, some of you know my situation, some don't - suffice it to say I have a lot less coherent free time these days Anyhow, we'll see how fast i can pump this map out.

I've been commissioned to do a map for a campaign set in a superheroes gaming system that is currently under development.

While I wait for a copy of the initial layout of the city, I figured I would start off with bashing my head against the desk repeatedly while trying to learn Illustrator. My prediction was correct - based on past experiences, I figured I would have a rough time overcoming the learning curve - and Adobe is not known for making things completely intuitive. Now that I have sacrificed enough pain to the Adobe Gods, Illustrator is now providing me with workable results.

This is a **very** rough test piece, just to get a few ideas in the works and see if it's feasible to continue. The next version will have much better street layout, this one was to test the street colours and strokes more than anything - and considering a single line in Illustrator can only be one colour unless you start to mess things around (calling it a Stroke implies to me that it should be a colour around the edges of the coloured line - but no, in this case it's the colour of the line itself.. wording!! it's all about the definitions and differences in percieved definition between tools.. the problem with adapting from photoshop to this which is 100% paths. ahwell, enough whinging for now).

I'm considering taking notes on this one to track what I do, maybe even turn it into a tutorial - there aren't many modern day city maps like this that I recall having seen on the site, maybe someone else will be able to benefit from my pain