LOL! Cheers. Hopefully the process will faster the second time round. I'm still feeling my way around with this.
Neon - do you want to give the city a name and then I'll move this thread into the CWBP forum?
LOL! Cheers. Hopefully the process will faster the second time round. I'm still feeling my way around with this.
Neon - do you want to give the city a name and then I'll move this thread into the CWBP forum?
Last edited by ravells; 06-03-2008 at 06:31 AM.
Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User
Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice!
Any questions on CC3? Post them with CC3 in the Subject Line!
MY 'FAMOUS' CC3 MAPS: Thunderspire; Pyramid of Shadows; King of the Trollhaunt Warrens; Demon Queen's Enclave
Next stage of the WIP. I need to look at some reference street plans...I know I should but I get lazy and just slap the buildings down any old how. C&Cs welcomed, it's looking a bit blah...needs more variety to the building styles too I think.
Looking amazing already. My only wonder at this stage is how do you get in ? The only sensible entrance seems to be at the top but its surrounded by water. Is it going to get a big bridge ?
The city outline is based on Montepulciano in Italy (if you want beautiful walled cities, northern Italy is the place to go). Attached is the real map with the entrances and exits, which I may or may not follow depending on how the internal structure of the city begins to shape out. The map is drawn with vector software (drawplus), so the towers are dead easy to move around the walls. Similarly the river is easily moved too as it's vector based - but a big bridge sounds quite cool, so I might leave the river where it is.
The information I'm trying to get across (unsuccessfully so far) is that the city is built on a slope which is high in the south and almost at ground level to the north. I think the surrounding mountain conveys that but it's really difficult to graphically depict the slope in the city itself without making a more isometric type view (which comes with all its own horrors of construction).
Also, I'm finding it difficult to give the impression that some of the buildings are higher than others. Varying the length of the drop shadow and inner shadow helps a bit, but the result is still not striking enough to be obvious.
Sigurd, not sure what you mean by 'food prep' areas, but I'll probably dot some farmland around the city. From what I can make out in Neon's CWBP map, it's in the middle of a forest, so I may have to rework the background a bit.
This is my first go at mapping a city and I'm learning a lot as I'm going through it. One of the most difficult aspects, I find is to have the form of the buildings or collection of buildings suggest a function. Without this, I fear that the city will just look like random lego blocks with no underlying human intent and no layers of history written upon it. I think it's time I looked at a few books...
Ravs
Here's the next WIP. I don't usually own to listening to music while I'm working, but I couldn't get Rainbow's 'Temple of the King' out of my head...so I played it, and it helped.