Haibianr - docks area WIP

Hi all,
Been so bad about finishing up my mapping projects lately. Well, time's a wastin' on my Curse of the Emperor's Stone adventure...so I've been trying to catch up. The first part of that adventure takes place in the docks area of Haibianr, so I'm including an area map with a key to various establishments, etc. Here's the start on it. To get it going I zoomed in on my city map to find the area I needed and then did rough outlines over that in Illustrator. Then I brought the various layers into Photoshop and used them as masks as I started painting. Right now I'm working on getting the terrain up to speed and then I'm going to start on the water and harbor floor. Buildings, docks, and bridges are next up after that.
M

Lots more work; not much visual progress. Stopping for the night, though, so I figured I'd post what I have. Spent a lot of time playing with the water and trees to little effect.
M

This is progressing quite nicely.

You're taking an already great map and making it better, bravo. I really like your forests so far, simple yet works very well.

-D-

Thanks, guys. I didn't get any time to work on this tonight but hopefully can post some more in the next couple of days. Will post it at higher res when I get some more detail - a lot of stuff isn't showing up at this size.

The overview map of the city is going on the inside front cover and this one will be inside the rear cover...so I want it to be a good one. When done it'll have a key pointing out interesting locations for the GM to use while the PCs are out on the town.
M

Little more. Playing with the roofs (rooves? nah.) now. I created a bevel layer on multiply and then modified by painting to create some different roof shapes (bevel is great to get the lighting right for different surfaces but I can't bring myself to use it without modification even though it'd be quicker). There's also a color adjustment layer over that. Underneath it all I've been dropping in textures and mushing them around. I'll have several different kinds of tile and wood shingle textures when I'm done but there are only two styles on there now. Over that I plan to have a decoration layer with little rows of tiles along the ridges and so forth. Much more to do but I'm trying to do it pretty quickly. Still, it's amazing how much time this stuff takes...must. accelerate. process.
M

That's looking superb, mearrin!

Thanks! Now roughing in the wall. Haven't decided if I want to have a tiled roof on the towers or not...it was kind of in some of my concept sketched but maybe I like it without. The ground shadow is currently, as you can probably tell, just a temporary layer effect dropshadow. I'll be fixing it later but want it to interact properly with the buildings and the trees.

Hmm. Seems I need a bridge also... :)

Critiques or suggestions welcome at any point.
M

The only thing odd to me is that the trees don't seem to be very tall and they're all roughly the same height. I have no idea to fix either thing, though, (my brain must have shut off) so great job :)

Thanks. Indeed. The trees are fugly at this point. I have three layers of tree cover with their own bevel and shadow, hoping that would give the impression of depth. Unfortunately that failed miserably to do so. I'm going to do some more work on them at some point but they sort of look okay zoomed out so I'll leave them while I get the buildings together then go back to them.
M