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Firenze

Iron LlamaIron Llama
in Show and Tell
I can finally show off map I did with City Designer, which is included in issue #10 of Pyramid magazine but also freely available in the preview PDF (SJG37-2610_preview.pdf). Most of it was made by "tracing" a street plan from a real map image, then using the random street tool with distance between buildings slammed down to zero to fill in most of the buildings and a bit more deliberate work on things like the Duomo or the Uffizi. A few layers for the Arno and paved vs. unpaved areas, a little blur and shadow, and then a lot of rendering time on my sadly underpowered computer. I think this worked tolerably well (certain, it allowed an emphatic non-artist to draw a presentable map), but the intersections were a lot of effort. Lining a street with buildings usually meant blocking anything crossing it, so I had to go back and remove buildings that ended up in the middle of some other road. I'd be happy to see a street drawing tool sensitive to cross-streets, but CD as-is is certainly infinitely better than no CD at all. Should I have time some day, I may try to do Venice as well.
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Comments

  • Joachim de RavenbelJoachim de Ravenbel Surveyor
    That's a very good map. You've managed to give a very *real* feel!
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  • GandwarfGandwarf
    edited August 2009
    That's a pretty large city, so it must have taken quite a few hours to create :-)
    I like the layout, my only nitpick would be that all the buildings have the same colored roof. I would have liked to see some variation (I think it would have made the city look a bit more organic/realistic). Still, very nice work. I also like very much what you did with the walls.
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  • Iron LlamaIron Llama
    Posted By: Gandwarfmy only nitpick would be that all the buildings have the same colored roof. I would have liked to see some variation
    Good idea. Roofs tend to be the same color because rooftiles tend to come from the same sources of clay (go to Google Maps and get a satellite picture of the centers of cities with a well preserved historical core like, say, Turin or Lucca), but there are some variations here and there. I'll have to play with that on my next city.
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  • GandwarfGandwarf
    edited August 2009
    Yeah, agreed. Most houses would have at least a roof made from the same material. But there could be some slight color variations like you said and maybe even some bigger differences, like thatch for the poorer quarter and good quality slate for the houses of richer families. It looks like you are creating more historic maps though and I am used to making fantasy maps (meaning I have some more freedom :-)
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  • jaerdaphjaerdaph Traveler
    Thanks for sharing this, Iron Llama. It's nice to see CC3 used in RPG publications like this.
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