Balakovo

[shantedracule]

Ok did a bit of work added more buildings blurred the hightmap to get rid of artifacts, whent to the shade relied and with a 10% whight went over till the bridges stopped followin the terain. Lightened the roads, added some slight bumbmapping for texturing on some things, Dropshadowed curent buildings, Drob shadow on roads then aplyed a Layer mask of the river so that it placed shadow only on he water. And I'm sure I tweaked something else and didn't mention it.

[shantedracule]

Just realized that I have to evict the orange building and rethink that whole idea... I'll leave for a place holder till the rest of my buildings are done.

[Immolate]

The shadows on the houses are a bit inconsistent Shan. Some of them are only possible with a northeast light, some southeast, and some southwest. If you're going to lock down your roof lighting, you need to angle the building before you do, or you'll wind up with an effect that displeases the eye, even if the brain doesn't understand why.

Let's say your light is coming from the southeast. A house running north/south would have light on it's east face, shade on the west face. A house running east/west would have light on the south face, shade on the north. A house running southwest to northeast would have light on its southeast face, shadow on the northwest.

But a house running southeast to northwest would have no shade, because the sun is looking down on both faces of the roof equally.

A house running northeast to southwest will have the most sun on the southeast face of any angle, because it directly faces the sun. The northwest face will be darkest of any angle, because it faces directly away from the sun. Each degree of rotation from that angle decreases both light and dark.

Because there are effectively infinite angles of rational, there are infinite amounts of sun and shade that you might need to faithfully reproduce. Practically speaking, it isn't nearly that bad, but it is still difficult enough that you really need to let Photoshop or Gimp or whatever do as much of the heavy lifting as possible.

On some complex buildings that have to be assembled largely ahead of time, I will produce eight different angles: 0, 22.5, 45, 67.5, 90, 112.5, 135, and 157.5, and then rotate them as needed. The amount of angle error doesn't seem to be a major problem. But as often as possible, I rotate to the final angle before locking them down.

[shantedracule]

I thank you for the C&C, I'm using pre made buildings which inlies my Problem. Im also not sure how to go about letting Gimp do the heavy lifting or even where to start doing it my self. Also you went way over my head with the angles thing is that lighting nagles or some other angles? I think I'm going to go look for a Tut to start with.


I think my real problem is I want realy realy good looking maps...but do not have near the skill to do it.

[shantedracule]

Ok so I wirked on the buildings for a log while, and was never truly happy with them. I re did the texture of the original block layer so that it was some what easier to look at. I will still be working on the buildings (I is stubern) but I need to move on with some of the other detail of the map. so for right now this will have to do

[Juggernaut1981]

Shanta> I'd be saying two things...

#1 Stroke your river along the flow of the river to make those little white dots become little streaks.

#2 Maybe adjust the bridges. They seem to have shadows that are out of whack. Or maybe it's the colouring of the rails.

[shantedracule]

Yhea the bridge problem came when I further modified the terrain, it created a missmatch of the railings so then I went to fix that and here we are. I'll spend some time on my river and the bridges. Thanx for the C&C and the next line of work on this map

[shantedracule]

OK did a lil work on bridges trying to get them more or less same color strokes. And then used a blure stroke on the river to get it to look like it was actualy moveing in the desired direction.

If any one has a good repository for symbols such as wogon wright inn and blacksmith it would be apriciated?

[Juggernaut1981]

There are a couple of sites out there with Heraldic ClipArt. They might be worth a try. I could also upload what I have. They are kinda small grainey GIFs but people with more talent could probably make similar things that still have that classic Heraldry look.

[shantedracule]

That could work, I was think of stuff I could use for designating locations on this map. I'll see what I got I downloaded a few to mae the heraldry symbol in the bottom left corner there