Gwydnker - The White City

[QED42]

Sitting on the coast of the Yeyn Sea is Gwydnker. The white city gets it's moniker from it's gleaming white walls and famous great white palace.



I started with a random city created from this site which you can see in the WIP thread but it's not much of an interesting WIP thread.

Any comments and criticism would be gratefully received.

[ChickPea]

Nice map and city layout. A couple of things to consider for the future...

Your buildings have an unfortunate case of jagged edges. Not sure what you used to make the map, but a little anti-aliasing would help greatly. Another thing to consider is adding some texture to the sea and land. Those areas look awfully flat compared to your buildings and nice cobbled streets. Sometimes even just grabbing a parchment texture and setting it to overlay or multiply can take away the flat look without much effort.

Nice work though. Minor issues aside, it looks good.

[QED42]

Thank you for the feedback and pointers! Mostly I'm just learning by trial and error so it really helps being nudged in the right direction. Hopefully the terrain for the next map I've made looks a little better but it's certainly something I need to work on. Jagged edges do seem to be a recurring problem I have though.

[ChickPea]

What software are you using?

[QED42]

I've been using GIMP version 2.8.22

[Mouse]

I agree with ChickPea - that's a nice map

I've also been pouring over the details a while, examining the jagged edges. I think it may be the resolution. Its right on the edge of being too low. You can see it more in the trees - they are really quite badly pixelated.

A trick to make everything look a lot smoother is to work at twice the size you intend to publish, and reduce the rendered/exported file by 50% before you publish it

[QED42]

I agree with ChickPea - that's a nice map

I've also been pouring over the details a while, examining the jagged edges. I think it may be the resolution. Its right on the edge of being too low. You can see it more in the trees - they are really quite badly pixelated.

A trick to make everything look a lot smoother is to work at twice the size you intend to publish, and reduce the rendered/exported file by 50% before you publish it

Thanks for the tip. My poor old PC might not be able to handle the ever increasing pixel requirements but I shall endeavour to keep going larger! When it comes to resolutions (and DPI) I'm not really sure on what to aim for as it's all new to me

[Mouse]

The strain on your PC is affected by the dimension of the file, but it is also affected by the number of layers.

You can improve the situation a bit by clipping the size of a layer to the extent of the thing that is drawn on it, using 'Layer/Autocrop layer' from the menu.

Another thing you can do is something that ChickPea once described to me, and which I tried to explain on another thread earlier this evening.

I hope this helps

Thanks for the rep!

[ChickPea]

It's good advice to work twice as large as you need to... though I have to admit, I hardly ever do that! Next best thing is to do what you can to avoid the jaggies in the first place (or minimise them, at least.)

For this map, if your building base colours are on the same layer, the quickest & easiest thing to try is duplicating the layer and giving it a small blur (try 1.0 - you can always repeat if that's not enough). Then just play about with the opacity and try to lose the sharp edges in the blur. You don't want it to look fuzzy, but just a little aliasing at the edges makes a huge difference.