Arianis (Port Town)
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So this has been a pretty major work in progress for me, and I just felt compelled to show it. There's some Photoshop postwork in there, but the vast majority was CC3 with some custom fills, some buildings from Cityographer's Medieval package, and trees from the CSUAC.
Hoping that this is the first of a few different maps for a project I've been busy working on for a while now! Suggestions and critiques definitely welcome!
Hoping that this is the first of a few different maps for a project I've been busy working on for a while now! Suggestions and critiques definitely welcome!
Comments
since you're asking for suggestions:
1/ any way to curve the roads more ? These straight polygons do not feel natural (in a modern city they probably would). Or maybe use different type of roads. The current dark brown dirt for main roads, and lighter and smaller roads that fade better into the grass
2/ often country roads are protected with rows of bushes or trees, you may decorate the main road with that. It would avoid having straight lines with green on one side, brown on the other.
3/ the left kinda feel empty. Maybe add a starting forest on the north west corner, and a Mill on a small hill on the bottom left corner.
4/ you could also add a round place somewhere in a front of any offical building (including religious buildings) where people gather (market place, fountain...) using the same kind of zone you used in zone 2. That way you don't have only roads intersections.
5/ technical nickpicking : the delta is a nice idea. but branches should be all smaller that the upper river, or the water level should be different resulting in a different water color.
Nice work anyway.
Keep up the good work :-)
DMG
After seeing your suggestions, I started working on it a bit more, and I did not only go ahead and curve the roads more, but made the less major ones smaller and gave them all a little less 'regularly used' feel, that I think may also cut down on the starkness between road and grass. I should have an updated version to show once I get onto my main computer this morning.
I think once all is said and done, the left may not feel quite so empty, as I'm planning on putting my Key in the NW quadrant, but I did add some forest around where the road trails off to the southwest, also based on your suggestion.
I honestly had not considered any of that, re: the deltas, but I think both of you are right, Barliman. I think I will probably cut off that second tributary and instead make the entire stream itself part of a larger delta source, as this is definitely a smaller fishing town, not a New Orleans or Cairo that one might find sprawling over an entire delta area. Good call on that!Thank you very much, DMG! I promise, the updated version does have the map key. Should see that sometime this morning. ^_^ Thank you very much for the praise, though!
(edited. Noticed an issue with the stream by the mill and fixed it.)
One point is probably the bridges would be at right angles to the water flow because that would be much easier to build. I think in general, all river crossings would tend to be at right angles or thereabouts?
Also, your mileage may vary if you're using CC3+. I've found some of my map settings have to be re-tweaked depending on the program I open.
First off, a quick word about image sizes. CD3 with the high res artwork works very well for me because of its VH image sizes. The CSUAC fills haven't worked as well for me larger areas, just due to their image size, but do awesome for smaller areas. The larger the image, the better and the less chance of a noticeable tiling effect. I do a lot of 3D hobbyist work, so I have lucked out and found a lot of good textures for fills. That said, the images I mostly use for this map aren't that big-- only 400 x 400 px. But what really works for them is their similarity.
Some of these are repeated twice (I think one is my jpg and one is the png I created from them), but the difference between grass and soil transition and the grass and soil_soil, or grass and track, is slight enough that they'll blend well together. If you can find free sets via google image searches that have multiple shots from similar areas, they tend to work really well.
So here's my map without the image effects. As you can see, some of my land areas, I've already filled with the bitmap texture fills. You might be able to tell that the upper left area has a soil and grass rounded polygon on one sheet, overlaid by a more straight grass rounded polygon on a separate sheet, all on top of a darker one on a third sheet (very darkest grass, top left corner). I filled the main path with the same texture I'll overblend the background with to make the path transition well when I texture overblend and edge blend it.
What might not be so apparent is that there are multiple sheets, and that each bitmap fill is tiled, but scaled up, sometime as much as by 30 or more, with the Unit checkbox unticked. Here's my City Background Sheet (effects on) by itself, with the bitmap fill style shown. Again, a lot of this has been trial and error to try to get something not so readily visible as tiling, so I apologize I have no hard numbers.
And here are my sheets. You can see (I used upper/lowercase, whereas the defaults are all Upper) I added a pair of 'transition' sheets between city background and background, and each of those have similar texture overblends and edge fades. What that achieves (at least, it seems to me) is that you have a more gradual stair-step effect from the underneath texture (the bitmap fill) to the edge-faded overblend texture, to finally the full overblend texture. And then the same thing happens on the next sheet up, leading up gradually, and finally, to the texture I use on the City Background sheet.
On my overblended texture effects, I do the same thing I do with my bitmap fills-- I scale them up, usually by 10 or more. I can definitely say that a lot of trial and error were involved (if you look at my topmost map, the road blends were hideous to start, although the tiling was mostly intact), as different size textures will produce better at certain scales. But hopefully this gives you an idea! Thank you much for the praise!