Thread: Meerzicht (City Designer 3)

Just a couple of questions regarding the way that the map is constructed and not on the content of the map:

- Are the towers and walls on different sheets? The shadoows of the towers on the walls seem doubled. I would guess that the are on different sheets to allow for different heights but the double shadows effect is weird. I would recommend changing the length of the shadows on the towers so that they have shadows that are longer than the wall shadows.

- Halfway up the middle vertical wal is a shadow discontinuity (a triangular chunk missing frmo the shadow). Did you export this map at high resolution and then make it smaller or is that where two wall segments join? I ask because that's the sort of artifact that I do not expect in that sort of area.

The design of the city is overall interesting and it may be showcasing some of the limitations of the shadow filter in CD3. I have a bit of a personal stake in the flaws in that particular filter and am trying to figure out if it is a filter code problem or an infrastructure problem.

Originally Posted by waldronate

Just a couple of questions regarding the way that the map is constructed and not on the content of the map:

- Are the towers and walls on different sheets? The shadoows of the towers on the walls seem doubled. I would guess that the are on different sheets to allow for different heights but the double shadows effect is weird. I would recommend changing the length of the shadows on the towers so that they have shadows that are longer than the wall shadows.

- Halfway up the middle vertical wal is a shadow discontinuity (a triangular chunk missing frmo the shadow). Did you export this map at high resolution and then make it smaller or is that where two wall segments join? I ask because that's the sort of artifact that I do not expect in that sort of area.

The design of the city is overall interesting and it may be showcasing some of the limitations of the shadow filter in CD3. I have a bit of a personal stake in the flaws in that particular filter and am trying to figure out if it is a filter code problem or an infrastructure problem.

- They are on two different sheets. The walls are on the "Walls" sheet, the towers on the "Symbols" sheet. Making the shadows longer on the towers doesn't really solve the problem as you still have overlapping shadows (see attached screen). I don't know if this is fixable in CD3, as I am not that experienced with it. Actually I overlooked the whole overlapping shadows bit and I don't really mind, but you have a point.

- The artefact is entirely my fault. I am glueing pieces together. I will fix it in the next version

And an update of the map. This update was done in about 1.5 hours.

Very sweet, but the house shapes are too regular to make it look natural, if you know what I mean. is there any way of really mushing shapes together with CC3 (like adding two shapes together to make a single shape?)

I should do a two-part filter that allows for accumulating shadow lengths and then generating the shadows at the end like the lighting filter does. It would eliminate the doubled shadows.

Now if there was just some way to get the roofs to render height information then the shadows could have the right profile...

Originally Posted by ravells

Very sweet, but the house shapes are too regular to make it look natural, if you know what I mean. is there any way of really mushing shapes together with CC3 (like adding two shapes together to make a single shape?)

I am not sure what you mean
Although I do agree the setup of the houses could be better.

Do you mean something like this? The houses are really squeezed together:

http://www.profantasy.com/images/cd3.../gallery12.jpg
(example on the Profantasy website)

It's also possible to draw different house shapes and then connect them.

Sorry, should have explained myself better. Most of your buldings are rectangles and in real medieval walled cities, buildings are not always rectangular. Take a look at the google earth picture of Lucca (italy) below.

Originally Posted by ravells

Sorry, should have explained myself better. Most of your buldings are rectangles and in real medieval walled cities, buildings are not always rectangular. Take a look at the google earth picture of Lucca (italy) below.

That's a nice pic!
I am finishing the map in its current style, but for my next map I will try something like that (I know CD3 can do something like that, I just have to learn how I can do it). It's so much fun playing around with this software

Ok so I wrapped this map up in under an hour. Now that it's semi finished I noticed something peculiar. The city layout resembles a cat. ACK!
That was definitely not intended.