Need some suggestions for my first map

[IdiotDogBrain]

Hi Ravells,

thank you for four advice!

Playing with the outlines option is a very good idea, it really helps the final map. Unfortunately its to late to do it for my current map- since I did not know nor searched the save city function in City Creator I only have the city as a picture. One of the more epic failures in my workflow...

I checked out the tree thing. It looks very promising but I still have to check if I can incorporate the wood carving effect with it. I will keep you updated!

I think using the magic wand is THE time saver in the whole approach. Changing color before exporting the file is key to success. How do you export your images from the program? I just did a 2600x2600 pic, that turned out to be to graini for some effects, antialiasing in special. I will do a greater pic size next time, even though I have to find out how to reasamble the picture sinc I will need to export in in different parts.

The woodcut effect is based on a tutorial from this forum.

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@kestrelgrey: I will search for that tutorial. Sounds promising! Working with shades of grey is a nice idea- I am going to try this out next time. I tried it on this map to but lighning certain layers did not worked very well after the woodcut effect was applied, since it lights out the effect as well.

Does anybody know a way to take a layer and lightening darker areas more then areas that are already in a very light tone?

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@Lukc
As mentioned to ravells the city creator only allows for very small resolutions- 3200x3200 is the most you can get. On smaller resolutions Antialiasing wont do much good. Or am I doing something wrong? What resolution would you guys use on a map of the shown scale?

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Anyway, I tried to work with some color. At first I was not very pleased, but then I tried the overlay option on the colored layers and the result looks promising:



Many thanks for all the positive feedback, really made me working on this more than I planned and it helped making the map better.

[ravells]

Hi IDB,

Hope you find the guide to city creation useful, I'm working on an update but I got distracted by playing Skyrim

Unfortunately you cannot 'save' an individual city within RPGCC, you can only save the settings which will produce a new city everytime you click generate. I assume that it works off a random seed number but as far as I can tell, you do not have the option of putting in your own seed number.

So all you can do is export a .bmp of your city and you can get much better resolution than a 3200 px square bitmap. See the window above the resolution window which says divide section into .... 1X1 up to 15 X 15. So with the maximum resolutions you can get a map of 3200 x 15 = 48,000 px square which is more than you will ever need. However if you choose anything over 1X1 the bitmaps are generated as tiled images. You can easily assemble these in GIMP by making a canvas of the total size of the image and using snapping.

To anti-alias the result check out this tutorial

http://www.phong.com/tutorials/anti-alias/

it's for photshop but you may be able to get it to work in Gimp.

Best

Ravs

[IdiotDogBrain]

Unfortunately my very slow computer will not allow for much bigger pictures but as soon as I get a new one I will try to make cities with bigger resolutions. I tried to get the antialiasing work but I have to admit that it didnt turn out for me. I will need to find a online Gimp antialiasing tutorial...

I used some of the advice from this thread (textures and colors and the Tree Thing) for my next map. Worked out fine:

[grangarian]

That is a pretty nice style you use. The roads are much better. I'd like to see more of your city maps.

[IdiotDogBrain]

Thank you! I just finished another map and put it into a new thread. Its a bit different this time, because I wanted to do something not quick & dirty.