My first city (Solace) a massive trade metropolis

[bleedscarlet]

Hi all.

Just wondering if anyone has any tips on how to make a cliff in photoshop? I'm totally friggin lost. I got this far!



That's what I'm working with right now, no cliff just the shadow from one :p

Anyone know how to make it work?

[bleedscarlet]

Oh, and I suppose for some scale, each checker mark is supposed to be 1 mile. This is a city on my own campaign, designed to be similar to Sharn. There's some more about the city I haven't drawn up yet, but this is pretty much the gist of it.

Eventually it is going to have a floating circle above it, smaller than the city, perfectly circular and it houses more "important" buildings, churches, temples, and parliamentary offices. Above that is a higher, and even smaller disk that maintains some massive weaponry to guard against an invasion from the sky. Can talk for days about it, but map wise, that's all the important stuff. And as for how they're floating: Magic....of some sort. and in the center of town are about two dozen "elevators" that go from main to the highdom and the crow's nest. There's also one level down where there's all plumbing and stuff. All the homes have gravity plumbing that feed into the cliff face, leaving a giant mouth that oozes dookie, and empties into the sea.

It's supposed to be on the face of a cliff that's not too terribly high. It's about 75 feet above sea level, and what I haven't drawn in is a marina on the north and south faces of that cliff further inland

[bleedscarlet]

Gonna remove the shadow for now, I think, and try to create a cliff using another fractal outline below the continent, and use vertical thin lines to connect the two, texture map and displace it and see how it looks.

If it ends up taking too long, I might table it for now, I've got a lot of mapping to do and not much time to do it, my next campaign game is coming up soon and I'd rather have them out by the basics and then polish them up at a later date.

[Larb]

I usually draw in the cliffs by hand and shade them appropriately so they look somewhat three dimensional.

By the way the scale seems a bit off if each of the black and white segments equals a mile. That makes those two main streets over 500ft wide for example.

[bleedscarlet]

I usually draw in the cliffs by hand and shade them appropriately so they look somewhat three dimensional.

By the way the scale seems a bit off if each of the black and white segments equals a mile. That makes those two main streets over 500ft wide for example.

yeah, 100%....I haven't decided how I'm going to fully scale things to be appropriate, and I draw my maps like they would be drawn in the age, so without satellite imagery and stuff everything is done by hand, and a map commissioned by a town's mayor or something might be specially designed to exaggerate certain features, like roads that were built under his watch.

But yeah, as it stands now I'm either dropping down the scale or thinning the roads. This city is my world's center point, so it really should be hugely massive, but 500 ft is just a little wide...for ANY city. That's wide enough that on a really foggy day someone could build a small home in the middle of the road, and you wouldn't see it from your window until the next day! :p

[bleedscarlet]

Some updates!





And in case anyone wants the full size versions,

First:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5el7dbjkff...Final-Full.jpg

Second:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0sfjwb8yfu...-Hand-Full.jpg