Reply With QuoteQuick update, just replaced the Church and the walls/towers, thanks CM for the tips on the jaggies. Oh yeah, weapon smith relented after much flogging
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Excellent progress.
Minor typo - the easternmost "weaonsmith" may need a flogging until he gets his sign fixed
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
Quick update, just replaced the Church and the walls/towers, thanks CM for the tips on the jaggies. Oh yeah, weapon smith relented after much flogging
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One of the hazards of hand-placing shadows, besides all the math and having to draw each one a pixel at a time and having to deal with compound shadows etc. etc., it's also another place you can mess up if you're not paying enough attention.
To make roofs without hips and where the tiles align properly with the roof, you first must draw the rectangle of the building at a 90 degree angle, but longer than you actually need. Then you add the pattern, make it permanent by merging it into a blank layer. Then you take your rectangle and rotate it to the proper angle, then apply the bevel. Again, you merge the structure into a blank layer to make the bevel permanent, then you can "clip" the hips off the roof, leaving a classic gable roof. If that sounds like a lot of trouble, it is, since you have to do that with each individual structure. Adding dormers makes it all a lot more complex of course.
Well I did all that for the 13 manor houses. I wasn't thrilled with the roof effect, but you can't redo everything that you aren't thrilled with on a city with a deadline, so I was prepared to accept a less-than-ideal result. I then began the shadow process. It's simple enough once you're used to it and if there aren't any interacting layers that make it complicated.
To create the shadow, you create a new layer, then ctrl-click the structure layer. For each pixel of shadow (I have -45 globals and 45 degree angle of light), you move the selection one pixel up and one to the left. Then you shift-F5 fill with black. You repeat this cycle for however many pixels you need. With my globals, I need one pixel for every foot of height, so my hundred foot towers have to have this done a hundred times.
Well I did all that for the manor houses (as a group of course), with a height of 24 feet. Sometimes when you do this, PS glitches and jumps six or eight pixels. At that point I back up and hope I still have an accurate count. Only this time I looked at the layer I was working on and realized that I'd messed up and was drawing my shadows on the manor layer itself. Daggumit. So I started ctrl-alt-z, but of course I ran out of undo buffer before I got all the shadow off the build. Zoiks! There was nothing I could do. I had to scrap it all.
As is usually the case, I do a better job on the second go-round because I learned something the first time. They did turn out better and I hope you like 'em.
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I feel your pain, bro. Which is why I have yet to go back and finish the tut with pics and edits. It takes forever. But it also looks pretty damn sweet (IMO). I'm glad that you're staying with it because you can learn so much by going high detail.
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
Added outbuildings, six-foot walls around the manor houses and iron spikes on the walls to keep the riff-raff out. The coolest thing was using paths to draw the walls and then put the iron spikes on another layer using the same paths and brush dynamics. This is cool because it allowed me to put shadows of the spikes on the tops of the walls and sticking out over the wall shadows. They're hard to see, but they're there!
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You know you're having way too much fun with this, right?
But still, it's definitely worth the effort so far!
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
<<<<Awed
Wow just wow I wish I could get my maps that good...
shantedracule: wow, thanks for the praise. The truth is, I'm not artist. I'm just determined and learning how to recognize good work and imitate it. The river, which is the anchor of this piece, was invented by Ascension. It struck me as beautiful so I put in the time necessary to follow his NRFPT tutorial and it worked! The city style, to a significant degree, was borrowed from CoyoteMax. Both of these guys are much better than I am. But I've put in a lot of time in the last five months and created a lot of maps, and every one teaches me a wealth of things about Photoshop and cartography. My goal is to someday give something of significance back to this community that has given me countless hours of enjoyment. Thanks again.
CM: I always try to have fun with these. This one, unlike Oten'Jo, has been a pleasure from start to now. I don't know if I can maintain that ease, but for now it's all good.
Ah, finally you have reached the inside of the walls! Can't wait to see at least the city itself finished. I am very curious how realistic the end result is going to look like. You put in a lot of thought and effort.
Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
Immolate, this is looking so good!
This is a *really* tiny nitpick, but I wanted to help make it perfect ... the fields near the monastery are a great texture, but there's barely visible tiling lines in there.
I keep trying to rep you for this, and can't. I'll keep trying until I can
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