August/September 2017 Challenge: O'Gray's Pearls

[- JO -]

Sorry to read you're ill ! I wish you a quick recovery and that you'll feel better very soon !!!

[Mouse]

Aw thank you Jo. That's so very sweet of you

I'm laid up at the moment, but that's only because the medication the doc gave me has knocked me for six. Side effects! At least I've stopped sneezing my head off every 5 minutes now! If I could just breathe through my nose I might get some sleep at last.

Hoping to do an update tomorrow sometime, and then let that be it with this map.

[Mouse]

I made better progress than I thought I was going to, given that I'm working on a cushion on my lap and feel like... nevermind!

Here is the final WIP

I hope you like the new font. This one cost me a bit to make legal, so it will probably keep making regular appearances on my sci-fi-ish maps in the future

### Latest WIP ###

[rdanhenry]

That's a much better font, in my opinion. While not optimal for readability, it does not make reading particularly taxing and makes a plausible choice for reasonably short texts. It also is not working quite so desperately to say "Look at me! I'm so futuristic! I must be a FONT IN SPAAAAACE!!!", which is not the basis on which anyone would actually choose their fonts just because they were actually in our future and out in space. If they chose an unreadable font, they'd probably go back to some ridiculously ornate Gothic font because it reminds them of how cool things were in the old days, back on Earth, dying of plague.

[Mouse]

Thank you again for your thoughts on this piece. Catching those errors was an invaluable aid to me

You make me laugh at the old font! Yes it was pretty much 'look at me' wasn't it

I also think I could have chosen better with the new one, but there was just something about Axaxax that got to me. I picked up the bold style free on Dafont.com, but had to buy the semibold at Myfont.com, where the regular was free. So I have 3 of the 7 styles in this font by buying only one of them, so its not so bad - and it wasn't the most expensive font in the world anyway

If I were to choose again I would pick the 'book' style of the font, instead of the semibold, or choose a similar one with better readability.

Still. It fulfils what I wanted at the time, which was a smooth looking font suitable for a relatively smooth (as in having a strong spherical nature) map theme. I think a serif font (one with little pointy bits on the straight letters) would have made the whole map look a bit cluttered.

[Voolf]

It is been a while since i checked this. You made huge progress Mouse. This is looking amaizing, next winner maybe ?

[Mouse]

Thank you, Voolf

I think the competition will be pretty stiff, and voting nearly impossible... providing a few more of us manage to get their maps done on time!

One of the interesting things about this Challenge is how very differently everyone has interpreted the theme, or maybe I should say 'themes'. That, in combination with the juxtaposition of all our very different mapping styles, means that if you look at the gallery at the moment you would never think that we are all working towards the same Challenge!

[Francissimo]

The way you paint your textures is really impressive! what you did with different types of fields and the grass is really nice and inspiring

[Mouse]

Aw thank you, Francissimo

That means a lot coming from one of the acknowledged masters of 'the space map'

I attribute a lot of the best points of this map to you, since I had no idea how to get the Sketchup city map to work properly before you showed me how to do it by recombining separate exports from Sketchup in PS/GIMP.

Texture painting is astonishingly easy. It involves filling an entire layer with a single texture, applying a layer mask, and painting in greyscale onto the layer mask to hide or reveal lines and shapes of that texture. If you make a mistake you can erase it by painting black on the mask to hide the texture again without making any alteration to the actual texture itself. Then you just have to have a layer for each texture you want to paint with. In this case I had 3 grass layers, 3 soil layers, 2 tree layers, 1 river bed gravel layer, and 2 river water layers. The rest came from Sketchup the way you showed me to do it (with separate exports of shading and texture from the Sketchup city I made), and all of this (the city and the texture painted layers) was placed between the bubble render from Blender, and the background. The hill shading was done the same way anyone else does it - with an overlay layer laid on top of the texture painting, and on which I painted the shading and highlights in black and white.

Its actually not anywhere near half as complicated or difficult as it looks. 99% of the time it took me was all about making the houses and building the city in Sketchup. There were times when I wasn't feeling at all well when I very nearly gave up altogether, but doing the work helped to distract me from the fact that I was ill, so I got there in the end.

A large part of this is down to the technique you taught me - so thank you very much, Francissimo

[Francissimo]

You're for sure a quick learner Mouse, you've mastered the technique in no time
I'm doing the same way as you for painting textures, masks in photoshop are so helpfull for that part of the work.
For hillshades i often use a topography layer at the bottom of all my layers and then use multiply or soft light blending mode for textures. Then i duplicate the hillshade layer on top of all my textures with various blending modes and transparency. That way you can set pretty accurately lights and shadow on your map.
Have you finished your shadows on your forest layer? Shadows are perfect in the city, but i can't see any shadows for the forests outside the city walls, so they look a bit flat when zoomed in (sorry if you already answer that, i must admit i didnt read all the thread ).
Also about the bubbles you used, they're perfect, nice work here! i often tried bubbles/domes map but never achieved that balance you get between a convincing effect and a clear map!
Glad you didn't give up on your piece of art, hope you'll get better