an attempt at a city

[LonewandererD]

I knew the shading was going to come and bite me in the a... anyway. The thing is that normally i use a bevel which gets the shading right automatically but these buildings were made Ascension style in which i take a large line and apply a gradient to make a pointed roof, one side shaded and the other side not shaded. The line is then cut up and rearranged as i see fit. The light in this particular map comes from the southeast and alot of the buildings seem to be aligned to point towards that direction, a problem with my road plans. As a result It not always easy to tell which side of the roof the shading will be on but i will try to rearrange it so that the shading falls on the northern and western sides of the roof.

This will take time though, I working with a lot of stuff on the map which is really bogging down my laptop, its getting to the point where i can't have alot of things running in the background and need to hide half my layers to get a tolerable speed of work.

-D-

[Steel General]

This is coming along nicely...aren't city maps fun?

[LonewandererD]

Fun in an excrutiatingly tedious kind of way, but what the heck, i keep going back to it so i can't complain.

Because of the size and sheer number of houses i've divided up the city into smaller districts and will be working on each district individually. I'll be posting these districts individually instead of the whole city so that you can see the districts at full resolution. Completed the Central Island District, below. It's the same as before but now i've added cleared areas of land around the houses, struts/beams to the roofs of the larger better tan houses, fences and some gardens where locals can grow their own vegetables, because rice and fish can only go so far. I'm going to try and cram as much into the city as possible to try and bring a sense of life to it and, well, i just like adding little details. I'm also trying to come up with some imaginative names for each district, I wanted to call the Central Island District "Fisher's Island" but i've decided to move the fishing industries either to the eastern area or have fishing villages further up the coast, as far away from the nobles and main residential districts as possible. So now I'm thinking of calling it "Ferry Point" or the "Young Dock's" District.

-D-

[Najmir]

Lone,

You have inspired me to have a go at a large city map myself. Just need to figure out where to start... !

[Ascension]

I know exactly how tedious and repetitive this is but it's the results that matter right? Lookin good my man.

[LonewandererD]

And so i trudge slowly onwards, i'm mainly just trying to tackle the large blocks of buildings within the city but i have done the area in the northwestern section beside the river, outside the city. For now it will be called the Northern Outer District and consists of some orchards (top left), a few mills (the water wheels need work), a stable, some houses and warehouses and a lot of trees. The trees are still in their experimental phase, they look good in small groves or individually but I have yet to come up with a good way of painting large sections of them. Looking back on the map now I've just noticed that i forgot to put in the cleared areas of land around the houses and roads.

NOTE: Progress will be slowed as we are about to move house, that and i'm still trying to increase the performance and speed of my photoshop, made some improvement but it could always be faster.

-D-

[Al. I. Cuza]

I love the details! Very engaging.

[Ascension]

That looks great, man. Yeah, the trees are a little off but you'll figure out something...I never do trees the same way twice. The rest looks better than I could do.

[Larb]

The trees might look better if you tone down the ammount of white in your bevel/emboss, or use a different highlight colour. (assuming you're using a layer style)

[Najmir]

Lone,

That is coming along nicely. On the trees, they seem to rise up from the edges to a flat top like it has been bevelled.. Maybe bump map low density noise in to the falt areas of the trees. Or even just for some light and shade.

Otherwise it is looking great. I have started working on a large city of my own. I doubt I will ever get it looking a nice as this and I dont have a spare year to spend on it