[Award Winner] Assorted tips and tricks

[torstan]

Today's lunchtime mapping tip - my workflow on mapping hills:



1. Lay in the shadows with a large fuzzy brush. In photoshop or the Gimp I'd suggest doing this on a layer with the blend mode set to overlay.
2. Lay in the highlights with a slightly smaller fuzzy brush. Avoid sharp edges. You want hills to be rolling, and in contrast to the sharp peaks of a mountain range. Again, here I've done this on an overlay layer.
3. Add colour (here I'm a layer with the blend mode set to colour) and leave the hills slightly browner than the flat plains. That helps to differentiate them - and means that even with subtle light and shade they'll be easy to read at a glance.

A couple of other things to keep in mind:
• Lay in the rivers first. As rivers drain the water out of hills, they will determine where the hills should go.
• Less is more when it comes to shadows and highlights here. Your mountains should have the darkest shadows. Make sure that your hill shadows are quite a bit more subtle.

[torstan]

City design.



When laying out a city, first pin down the major areas of interest.
• Where is the center of power?
• Where are the major markets?
• What do people need to defend, where are the city walls (if any).

The main roads will connect these locations, and they'll be determined by the city gates. Then smaller roads will radiate out from these locations - as people need to get to their source of food, and city planners tend to focus roads around palaces and city squares.

Once you have the roads in place the city map is entirely functional. You can label that and be done. Everything beyond that is making it pretty (and that's an entirely different topic - drawing buildings is a long task that can push people to the edge of sanity.

(today's map is taken from the City of Flint, illustrated for ENWorld's Zeitgeist adventure path: http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/2...eitgeist-maps/ )

[VonScamp]

Totally agree with Torstan's approach to designing cities from the roads up.

A simple technique for making your life easier when drawing the buildings is to duplicate your layer with the roads, expand them by a couple of pixels then delete the content from another layer to leave street blocks that you can chisel away at to create individual buildings. Don't forget to include some random bumps and holes in the buildings to make them more interesting and realistic.

VS

[optimus_mush]

Wow, this is awesome, and very well timed as I'm just at this point with a map of my own! Thank you so much. Do you have any further tips for mountains?