So here is the next rendition of this city that I am working at. I think I am kind of happy with how it turned out so far. I added a lot of smaller paths and am blocking out the city. So now I am adding in buildings to get an idea of how everything will work out. I cut out a lot of circular parts of the original circle for now... maybe I will find a way to add them in later. I still cant figure out if I want to to be a detailed map or just all black for the buildings (save the red ones as they are noteworthy) and grey for streets and walls.
I fear that I will be scrapping this idea in favor of something less time consuming. Given holidays and work I don't know if I will have the time to finish this to what I want before my campaign starts. Thanks for the comments and I will hopefully re-launch this idea sometime in the future.
Cities are MONSTERS of time devouring nature.
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
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Well... maybe I didn't quite scrap the map yet... The idea of hiding the circle within, yes, for now. However being that this is the main city of my campaign, it has to get done. So sice Photoshop was annoying me to no end and I couldn't concentrate, I decided to go do this by hand. This I have to admit is turning out much better than the last iterations I have been working on. Here is a bit of the in-progress of it. I do plan to take it into photoshop afterward and clean it up when I am done, plus add marking and major landmarks etc...
Here is an update, I have the lower tier of my city done. This includes the commons, and the slums in the top right section. The next tier up is the merchants tier, then nobles, and finally the top is reserved for the castle. I still haven't decided the height of each tier yet... but that will come later... My hand has cramped but I do believe the hardest part is done nowSorry for the bad lighting aswell.
Now that the tedium of drawing this map is done I can progress to photoshop to make it look all spiffy-like.
So I find myself with a bit of a problem. I am wondering what the best way to take this map into photoshop is... Not sure if I can get all the detail out of the buildings without having to go back and trace over everything. Anyone have ideas?
Well, scan it firstLike, duh, right? First, you have to fix the slant. So, set up some guides (screen 1). Zoom in to 1600% and make sure that your ruler is turned on and set to pixels (View - rulers then Edit - preferences - units & rulers). Click on the ruler at the top of the screen and while holding down the button drag a guide down or click on the side ruler and drag across. Put these guides where the corners are and the reason for turning on the rulers is important here (so is the 1600% zoom) when placing the guide make sure that it lines up with a line on the ruler otherwise your guide will be slightly offset (by like a half pixel) and when me make selections things will adjust to include the whole pixel and not just part of a pixel...so line it up right. You can zoom back out now if you like. Use the polygonal lasso tool and go around the corners of your slanted square - this will turn it into a selection once you've gone all the way around. Since we have guides the tool will snap to a guide if you're close enough. Edit - transform - distort. Grab a corner node and drag it until your square lines up with the outermost guide then hit the little checkmark to confirm the move. Repeat for the other corners. Do one corner at a time or else it has a way of affecting everything else. Now your slanted square is almost a perfect square (screen 2) - there might be a few stray pixels outside the guides but you can crop them out by using the rectangular marquee tool and Image - crop. Now you can get rid of the guides (View - clear guides or View - show - guides).
Now you have to separate black and gray pencil lines from the background grid paper. I've been working on this part for about 90 minutes now and I can't get anything good so I would suggest two things: 1) leave the color of the grid so that I can remove that and 2) ink the buildings (or at least the outlines) because the smudges and the gradient from the flash and angle are preventing me from cleaning it up...I've tried every trick I know of and invented a few more.
This last image I did a bunch of stuff. Black to white radial gradient on a new layer set to hard light at 25% opacity to darken the middle and lighten the edges. White airbrush at 2% flow with a mode of screen and painted some of the darker areas to pump up the white a little bit. Duplicate the layer and set it to hard mix at 50% opacity. New layer, merged everything together (ctrl-shift-alt-e). Hit it with paint daubs (brush size 1, sharpen 40, sparkle), then faded that 50% (edit - fade works only on the immediate previous filter) then set the layer to multiply. This is the best I've managed to get so far but if you ink it then a simple brightness/contrast should do the trick.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Thanks for that! I wasn't expecting anyone to put work into figuring it out, so that is greatly appriciated. I was also unable to get anything good for a selection in photoshop and I was at it for a while aswell. I went out today a bought some outliners that should hopefully be thin enough to do the fine line work. I also started on doing another quicker version of the map to have it ready for use. I just added a parchment backgorund, some light color to divide out the sections of the city, and red buildings for the notable ones. Afterwards going to number and label everything of importance. Nothing fancy for this one at the moment.
I would like to get this map in a nice shape for later, so this way I wont be stressing myself if I take my time with it in photoshop. I might have to go in and re-work some buildings to square things off a bit (especially on the important ones).
Here's what I have so far.
Once again, the input and assistance is greatly appriciated!
Anytime, man. I like to solve problems...especially ones that I already know the answers to.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
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