Thanks, JB. I see your point about the shadow on the south shore. Those are two hills with steep drops (almost cliffs) towards the river. It's definitely not correctly lit. I'll see what I can do.

There will be docks, wharves, and warehouses added all along the south river bank. It's still on my "to-do" list.

That gold building is the university and it's currently more of a placeholder for a yet-to-be-constructed building.

Good point about the scale on the castle crenellations. I hadn't really given that any thought. I'll have to re-do them. Thanks for the catch.

The city buildings were drawn in multiple layers (this is Photoshop CS4) using a square brush with size jitter set to about 50%, angle jitter at 0% with control set to direction, scattering set to 600% (one axis only), scatter count to 1 and count jitter at 0%. The bottom layer was a medium sandy tan color with a 30 px brush, the middle layer was slightly lighter color using a 20 px brush, and the top layer was lighter still using a 10 px brush. Once the layers were drawn, I used the inner bevel filter in Alien Skin's Eye Candy 6 to create the edges and then I completed the layers by using blending options to create a drop shadow for the entire layer. I had to tweak everything a bit and make several attempts before I finally got it the way I wanted it.

The ground cover was produced using Bryce 6. In fact, all of the underlying terrain, including the primary shadow overlay for the entire city, was created using multiple passes in Bryce. For the terrain specifically, after I finished the Bryce component and imported it into PS, I had to apply a very fine Craquelure filter, as the raw Bryce image looked very blurry if viewed at any kind of close-up resolution. I'm pretty pleased with the way that came out too.