Gnomsulost - A Wind-Gnome town

[Meridius]

LoL, I just thought it was in gnomish.
Shows you that I have no grasp of any language. Not even English.

Lol, that's a good one... But us Dutchies are a wee bit too tall to pass for Gnomes I'm afraid.

Anyway, I think I'll keep it this way. I've been blurring a lot of layers at a 0,3 pixel blur, to make the edges just that tiny bit smoother. I've added yet more dirt, I toned down the little earth ramparts around the fields. I decided to apply Dutch grammar to the plural of Gnome (I don't know how to properly translate 'Gnome' in Dutch, so I made it a borrowed word). I already did in a part of the text, and fixed the rest. The last thing I did was lower the opacity of some layers (the fence mainly), and I've moved the dirt layer to below the trees (it somehow ended up on top of the trees).

I'll hold it in WIP for a little while longer to catch potential tips and questions, if any. But I think I'll move it to Finished Maps soon, since I've already printed it (that's a 32 by 48 cm (or 12.5" by 18.5") map!!!). Which may suggest that I consider this done. And if anyone wants to know how I did something, please do ask.

Attached are both my personal Dutch version, and and the English version. The English one doesn't have a function, other than this forum.

Edit for some interesting facts and numbers about this map:
- The legend and labels consist of no less than 79 layers (including 50 text layers).
- The map itself only counts 39 layers, including 2 unused.
- There are 2 separate files.
- Flattened map + legend and labels = 79.1 MB
- Map itself = 96.2 MB
- I made 3 textured sketchup 'models' to make the building sketches, these where made earlier, and I decided to use them in the map.
- The map itself is 2000 * 2000 pixels, or in camera terms: 4 megapixels.
- The map including legend is 3000 * 2000 pixels, or in camera terms: 6 megapixels.
- Excluding Sketchup models I believe there's about 40 hours of work in this map.
- I haven't monitored it continuously, but I've spotted Photohops 'scratch disks' take up as much as 700 MB.
- I printed this map at just over A3 size (or just under A2 size), using a normal A4-multifunction printer, a sharp knife, a metal ruler and some glue.

[Jaxilon]

This is excellent!

I have one question, on the left side of the legend you say the little white squares, which I thought were sheep, are cattle? I haven't seem a lot of white cattle so I was just wondering if it was a translation thing or if they really were cattle. No biggie though.

This map is beautiful and makes me itch to get back to my own and work through some more of the tutorials so I can learn some of these techniques myself.

Repped and thank you for sharing. I can see this being a featured map.

[Meridius]

It says cattle because I translated the Dutch word 'vee' which translates to cattle but now that I think of it, cattle is more used for cows. Actually, it's supposed to represent all kinds of animals, but sheep is fine Those are a nice Gnome-sized type of farm animal anyway Perhaps livestock would have been a better translation.

(Note, a lot of animals who aren't white shop up as white dots on Google earth, only animals with really dark colour show up as such, but that also may have something to do with a lot of black-and-white cows who live in this part of the world

[Jaxilon]

Yeah here in the U.S. cattle usually means cows but you are correct it can represent any sort of herd type animals for harvesting. I was just wondering if you had meant sheep or livestock and if that was how it translated. I just find the way words translate interesting although I'm certainly no expert. So now I know a new bit of trivia: (if I have this correctly) vee in Dutch means livestock? I don't know how this is going to come in handy but you just wait

[Meridius]

Perhaps I'll change it to livestock in the final version for clarity. I hadn't exactly envisioned those little white dots to be sheep, but they might as well be.

And you're correct on vee meaning livestock (the 'v' is pronounced like the 'f' in 'flash' or 'fire'; the 'ee' is like 'ay' in bay. Dutch is a sharply pronounced language... start fearing the 'g', I've heard English natives comparing the pronunciation of your average 'g' to choking to death. ).

Also, I discovered that a lot of animals who have a general light colour appear as white dots on google maps aerial photography. There's some other colours, but it's usually ranging from black to light grey. Just to make them stand out a bit I decided to go with light grey.

The Gnomes in fact mainly keep sheep, goats and donkeys and perhaps some mules.

[Gandwarf]

I certainly expected the white dots to be sheep as well. Gotta love those fuzzy furballs