Sagitarii - practice city map

[Lingon]

Looking really good! Bridges with houses on them = instant thumbs up from Lingon

[Caenwyr]

Looking really good! Bridges with houses on them = instant thumbs up from Lingon

And that's why I did it of course. Lingon's badge of approval 😀. Glad you like it!

[Josiah VE]

I did, for the fishing boats at least. I tried doing that for the galleys as well, but those turned out far too blurry, especially when rotated. So I turned the original one into a smart object and copied and rotated that instead. Worked like a charm.

I think I'm gonna keep these ships for future reference, they're pretty nice (and took hours of research and work - too much for them just to be used here!)


What? You thief! Theft! Fire! Bloody murder!!
Nah, I'm kidding. Go ahead and do something crazy with it! Could you give me the link though? I can't seem to find the thread!

Just a minor heads up: since this practice map is turning out better than I thought (and since cities can basically be plunked down wherever you want on a regional map), I might recycle this one for my novel. I'm thinking Faltorn (on the southern peninsula of my novel map), although I suppose it will have to be rotated and mirrored to fit in nicely. Weird!

I know.. I'm a horrible person aren't I..
It's not toooo similar, just a coastal city, with docks and stuff, and yours will probably be better.

Looking forward to the next update!

[Caenwyr]

Hi all!

Since I recently got chosen for two separate commissions, I won't be updating this one for a while. But you can follow my work for one of those commissions here!

[Josiah VE]

Since I recently got chosen for two separate commissions, I won't be updating this one for a while.

Sigh, in the meantime I'll just be staring longingly at this..

I'll be following your commission!

[Quinnaria]

I really love the way you've depicted cliffs/slope. It provides a much better perspective with an overhead map than the usual "lines" method.

[Caenwyr]

Whew! almost 4 months since I last posted in this thread, but fear not, I haven't forgotten about this map just yet. The idea was for it to become a showcase of my city mapping style but it seems my Tell Rawja map has taken the cake here! Still, since this map has significantly larger houses and more diversity in both the terrain and the types of monuments, I think it will still serve its purpose.

Alright. Updates since the last post I made back in May:

1. developed a terrain map—see below. Yes, it's ugly. No, I won't use it in my map as is. But it was easy to do and it will help me with the shadowing for the harder parts of this map, especially drop shadows (since every building in this quick-n-dirty terrain map is flat-roofed, so for roof shadowing it's useless)
   
2. started shadowing the thing by hand. I quickly discovered that using the "light from the top right corner" rule (as I like to do) isn't gonna work if I want this city in the northern hemisphere AND want north to be up. So I'll probably rotate the final image 90 degrees clockwise so the city will be shown in bright late morning light. I'm nowhere near finished with the shading, but you should get a good idea of what I'm aiming for in the right portion of the map (which will be the south eventually). The drop shadows are generated automatically, but will be adapted to remove the impression that the houses are floating. Terrain shading will follow as soon as I've finalized the buildings.

So this is it: the current state of my work.

### Latest WIP ###

[ThomasR]

Glad to see you back and glad to see you back on this one !

[Josiah VE]

I'm glad you're back at this.
This looks as awesome as ever!
About the light, do you think anyone will notice? I know I sure wouldn't... I still don't fully understand what you mean.
Anyhow, looks great!

[ThomasR]

I was wondering, have you tried to dump the coastline layer ?