Rissfurth bei Zweimühlen - Medieval Village WiP

[Teferi]

So, yesterday I got done with Zweimühlen, today I started working on the next significant village up to the north. It's by a River with a large bridge housing a troll underneath it's pillars, Rissfurth is an important Tax station in the region, as all trade going many ways will funnel through here. Apart from that they have a Shrine to Efferd, the god of Water, Oceans and Storm, and are currently under the joch of an evil wizard.

I am especially trying to figure out how to do a cool water effect and make it seem... well, kinda natural I guess, but also fantastic and fantasy-esque.

Critique and Comments most welcome

[Teferi]

So, weekend is here, I got an hour or two of chilling in teamspeak and playing with the Map for Rissfurth a bit.
This is the result up until now <3

Critique and Comments still most welcome

[soggymuse]

This is pretty spectacular, Teferi. I'd be interested in seeing more of your process. Seeing the difference between the first and second attachments is neat and everything's looking great. I can't wait to see the finished version!

[J.Edward]

This is looking great Teferi.
The water fall and the grassy edge of the river look incredible.
Are you using photoshop? If so I have a suggestion for you.
Where your non-paved paths meet up with your paved roads -

you could use the smudge brush to blend them a bit.
If the dirt path is on a layer above the cobbled road, just blend the dirt path layer so it seems to fade out a bit.
That will have the effect of making a smoother transition between the two.

You're doing a great job with this city. Keep it up.

[Teferi]

@ J.Edward:
Thank you so much for the pointer! In fact I usually do exactly that, BUT sometimes I do forget. Had to draw over these, because I need to flatten all my layers quite frequently ( - otherwise my Computers performance will plummet severely ) THANKS SO MUCH for both your uplifting comments, as well as the hint! I had absolutely overlooked that

This is pretty spectacular, Teferi. I'd be interested in seeing more of your process. Seeing the difference between the first and second attachments is neat and everything's looking great. I can't wait to see the finished version!

Could you be more specific?
Well, Usually I just build some templates and keep adding onto those. For example:

- Streets
I have 2 or 3 templates of streets wich are curved etc, and another 1 for straight dirtroads, 1 for a curved dirtroad. Out of those I can easily puzzle together all the shapes I need for streets just by having a smooth transition Eraser.

- Fields
The Campaign and RPG I'm doing this for as a fanwork to support the Game I'll be running soon has a CRAZY detail of rules. The Dark Eye 4.1 is as german a roleplaying game as you'll find: There's rules and tables and mechanics for everything. So I figure out the average skill level of a farmer in that system, and then I just paste templates estimating the area a farmer can cultivate. After that I open my large pictures with Fields ( I got like 7 oder 8 different kinds of fields ) and just go crazy with the Clone-Tool- ( You'll see the overlay of the Area-Estimation in the picture I will link further down below )

- Water:
Going bottom to top it is something like this:
1) Draw a rough shape of the Waterbody in playin but very dark blue.
2) Copy some swampy texture over it, the one I use has darker patches for foliage, light green patches for dirty ground and blue patches for puddles of clear water. This one will overlap partly transparent and fading into both the blue waterbody as well as the surrounding grass.
3) Over that I copy a couple of 30% transparent layers of a watertexture wich I then darken in the middle and fade out with the swampy texture underneath
4) Over that I copy basically dirtpatches, or even the mudroads I use ( but keeping only the roads steep sides, deleting the roads themselves. ) and as fits some rocky cliffs
5) Over that I will spray some rocks or stuff, or add groundcover. Stones wich are submerged in water I make partly transparent on one or more edges.
6) When all this is done i flatten it and then take like a 70% bloom tool @like 4pxls, zoom in and draw the little wavy things.

- Houses:
I started assembling a palette wich I can just copy paste onto the map, then add some dropshadow and it's basically done
Sometimes I cut and paste and mix and match with the houses a little bit to get more variety. Apart from that ( because I detest simply cloning one and the same houses ) sometimes I play around with shading or foliage on the houses, mirror them, flip them, turn them partly etc. With this you need only a relatively small amount of stuff on your palette to fill in a town quite easily.


LINKS to my deviantart, because it's just scraps and WiPs:
http://thomads3890.deviantart.com/ar...253A1448997720
this is Rissfurth now, with corrected road-intersections, thanks J.Edward <3
There you can also see how I calculate sizes and shapes of fields

below is the palette of stuff I use to copypaste things onto a map. Sometimes there's an indication for scale ( I found this: Most maps do not properly adhere to a sensible scale for their buildings, resulting in ridiculously small or large houses, streets etc. Therefore I always have the current map's scale somewhere, and I usually have an Idea about the dimensions of most houses, as to make them sized proportionally )
http://thomads3890.deviantart.com/ar...253A1448998497

[J.Edward]

My pleasure Teferi.
I checked out your link over on DA - that is going to be a huge map once complete.
I see why you're flattening layers.

[Teferi]

I do hope so


Full WIP is up on deviantart, here
http://thomads3890.deviantart.com/ar...253A1449244649

Basically, the roadside fields are done and I added the clifface running alongside and then crossing the street. Lots of shrubbery etc still missing, as well as some outlying cottages and then: Vegetation, everywhere, and before that: The River

Maybe I'll get done this weekend <3

[Teferi]

Progress is Progressing. Full WiP can be found here:
http://thomads3890.deviantart.com/ar...253A1449380287

Lot's of Shrubbery and Trees and small stuff here and there has been added, a small highlightsreel would be this:

First off: Clifffaces. The entire city with the waterfalls is built in an area of sharp incline. I toyed around with shadows and lighting here, couldn't find anything that would satisfy me. In the end I settled for what you can see here


Finally the River got completed, more or less. I dislike boring longer stretches of riverbed and waterflow, and am still trying to be creative as to "what might I possibly add there to have some interesting thing every couple of dozen meters?". Also a huge problem: Since I'm a disorderly person, easily distracted and still not settled on a go-to standardized method for doing water I struggled HARD to make the added parts of the river mesh with the pre-existing ones :-S O_O Maybe I should make some notes in a notebook in the future, just to keep some reference and pointers as to "damn bro, what DID I actually do there?"


The Ford was a wee bit small, so I expanded it just a little bit. Also: This helped blend the old and new parts of the river into each other better: One could really tell where the old and new part met, so it was easiest to just add rocks on top and some movement in the water to diffuse the border between old and new, as well as adding an element of natural effects causing a different feel to the river.


A Fireplace, above two areas to worship the gods and welcome spring and stuff basically. To the Left is a large Pole on wich the young men fix large sacks of potatoe, and at the right time of day the shadow will cast to complete the godess PERaines Symbol ( a wheat spikelet ), with TSA's colourfull lizard to the left, where the girls paint rocks to assemble a scrim of lizards eggs and pray for fertility


Second little Waterfall, and due to it being so little I found that the exact thing I did on the larger one wouldn't work here as well, due to the smaller space and scope: Everything is more cramped


Lastly: A little spot for the youths to retreat to, in the shadow of a great oak <3

[soggymuse]

The scale of this thing blows me away, and I love all the "little" things you've added. If you need more ideas for things to add to stretches of the river, how about an otter family or expanse of reeds/grasses? (I would suggest beavers, but I'm not sure if a dam would screw with the river mechanics.)

Thanks for explaining your process more. I was mostly interested in how you develop the houses because I struggle to "see" how plain colour gradients will work once covered by the roof patterns in my own work. I noticed in the first thumbnail there are few textures on your houses, but then in the second thumbnail there were more so I was curious about how you got from A to B. I appreciate the notes about the other stuff too, though, especially about the river.

Great work, Teferi.

[Teferi]

Hey! Thanks for the Compliment!
Actually I do just a plain colour, add the black lines for tiling over that, while it is very large, and combine and flatten that, okay?
And then I just bloom and burntool the **** out of it, and then I shrink it down to a sensible size. At that point I will retouch some of the blacklining, like pick out some details or shapes I feel could do with some exaggeration. Then I bloom and burntool again
Most of the buildings in the tileset I linked to my deviantart above is about twice as large as I need it to be on the map.
This is, so I can rotate and mirror it - this sometimes produces some pixellated artifacts - into a proper position. Afterwards I then shrink it down just by free transform and dragging it until the size fits (this will even out any artifacts that might have been created in the process of rotation)
--> If you want me to, I could make a small tutorial for this, it is not hard.

Sadly, otters or beavers won't work: A single Meter is only 7 pixels in this scale, and a beaver would be half a meter. Sadly I don't think 3 by 3 pixel beavers would look like anything recognizeable...
[edit] That being said, I have been toying with the Idea of making the map more comic-ey, for example making a sketch of some cows lying in a field to apply to the grazing areas I added right now. I also thought about adding some topless girls bathing in the small lake, and having them be larger than they should be, so one can recognize 'em I'll definitely add "beavers and otters" to my list of "cool and fun stuff I'd like to add in wrong scale"!

Weeds and Grass and Shelf(is that a word? Schilf(gras) is the German word) is actually something I wanted to do a long time ago, as well as sunny flowery fields. However all the stuff I experimented with turned out ****, so for now I shelved that I will however be doing something - by necessity - as a certain kind of flower will play a veeery significant role in the campaign I'm going to tell ( it's the Quanionsqueste, in wich the "Quanion" wich is a flower holy to the sun god of Praios keeps cropping up ), and I plan on having them sprinkled out about the maps nonchalantly and possibly a little bit hidden. This way the Players can search visually on the map for some extra clues