Fenwatch (medieval border town)

[geoff_nunn]

Next time you might want to give some of the houses a different color to give the impression they have different roofs (making the town seem a bit more organic).

Thanks for the rep!

The buildings were definitely the toughest part for me. I was trying to adapt Pyrandon's PS city tutorial to GIMP. Unfortunately, the PS version uses a layer style of bevel and emboss while creating the buildings, which is not available in GIMP.

When I applied the bevel filter to the building layer, the bevel was not as sharp as I was hoping for and the emboss filter always turned the buildings a light gray, almost silvery color regardless of what they looked like before.

I ended up using several different layers at various levels of transparency. A bevel and emboss layer for shape
A shingle texture for, well... texture
a color overlay to get rid of the silvery sheen caused by the embossing filter
and several blending overlays.

I did a lot of experimenting with things while working on the buildings and feel like my process and final product wound up a little muddy in that regard. I intend to revisit this on my next map... possibly after downloading some python scripts to help me more easily modify textures and the like.