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Wow Hoel, that latest WIP is stunning! I love it.
It's good to be able to see all the pieces together
Oh, I didn't take it negatively. I just wondered what you defined as minimalist. I'll keep the elements to a minimum but I'll put in every single tree (they're in the ref. map I'm using). I love making trees.
The arty will be 48 pounder breach loaded cannons with rifled barrels. Made by Åkers Styckebruk in 1863. I think there's 120 or so, but only about 20 on the walls, most of them are on the second floor of the land front and 30 or so are in the bastions in the moat. The land front was used as barracks as well as the main defense. It was the first pemanent indoor quarter for soldiers in sweden and was critizised for making the soldiers soft with heating and running water. The top floor was officers aparments and some of them had a big cannon in the living room (the officer got a pay bonus for maintenance of the cannon).
The southern wall of the land front is 2-2.5m thick limestone while the peace side (north side) is much thinner.
The western bastion was a water cistern as well as a gun emplacement.
Wow Hoel, that latest WIP is stunning! I love it.
It's good to be able to see all the pieces together
Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
Originally Posted by Hoel
The only times I have EVER seen officers cleaning guns was on their basic arty officer course (all our arty officers are basic gunners first).
Looking forward to the rest.
Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.
Please take my critiques as someone who Wishes he had the Talent
Actually every apartment had a plaque on the wall detailing the obligations of cleaning and maintaining the gun emplacement (i think cleaning the actual gun was done by soldiers, they had a test firing every couple of months). It stated clearly that it was the responsibility of the wife to keep the gun mount clear and clean, so no officers cleaning guns.
One plaque is mounted in a diorama in the western moat bastion. It's one of the stops on the tour. One of the cannons is displayed next to it and and we load and 'fire' it on the tour.
If you're ever in sweden you should swing by. I'll take you on a tour.
Last edited by Hoel; 01-12-2009 at 12:49 PM.
This is coming together very nicely Hoel.
Any special trick to doing the trees?
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
1. Use a tree brush. I have a couple of different sizes, but the small chalk brush (looks like a cloud) will suffice. This was 25px size and 120% spacing
2. Pull up size jitter and angle jitter to max. Use 4-5 counts under scattering (you can use minimal scattering and count jitter)
3. Foreground/background jitter to max, 10-30% hue jitter (depending on how much color variation you want), 10% saturation and brightness jitter. Purity 0.
4. Choose two greens (or maybe orange/red/yellow for autumn), I usually make one a light green based on the grass colour and the other one a darker shade with a slighly different hue.
5. In a new layer turn on drop shadow (tweak it when your done) and bevel (chisel hard, tweak softness when youre done)
6. You can now draw with a mouse or tablet. Everytime you click PS will put down 4-5 (depending on count) brushprints in slighly varying hues.
If you want more uniform size of trees adjust minimum size under size jitter. Use sharper brushes for larger scale.
This is the same way I made the hedgerows in my Lilium map, but with a smaller brush and I tweaked the spacing since i drew lines instead of placing individual trees.
When trees overlap, they tend to blob together so for dense areas i put in 2-3 layers of trees and adjust the drop shadow a bit.
I'll do a tut with screen when I feel like it, but there you go. Anyone familiar with PS should be able to follow this right?
Edit: Just made som experimentations with dual brush and i noticed that with the fussball brush set as dualbrush and with a slightly bluegreen light color is could doubleclick and make something that looks like pine trees. I had to adjust the bevel a bit too.
I'm thinking that with a second layer where every tree gets a click of white/blue they will be snow covered pines.
Cheers.
Last edited by Hoel; 01-12-2009 at 02:58 PM.
2 posts in one day that mention the chalk brush...I never used it so I dumped it from the preset manager...dang! Guess I gotta reload those standard brushes.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Thanks Hoel, have to give that a try sometime.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
This is looking utterly superb, Hoel. Lovely work. The trees really make the maps sing.
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