Posted By: LoopysueLOL!

Thanks LE :D

So you are Dan Harlan? I have to confirm it - before I write it down in my little black book - the one that serves as a memory these days! :P

You'll have to forgive me for being perpetually confused when everyone has different names in different places. I never seem to remember them! Sorry!

And sorry also to anyone else I've called 'someone' in the last few weeks :)

Ha! If "someone" is the worst name you can call me then I'm pretty happy.

Yea, that's me. I used to try and keep all my "gaming" type stuff under this name, and FB was just for friends and family, but now... that's not really practical. I do try to keep the common avatar/logo, but we don't have those here.

I think I'm getting closer to getting these flying eaves right.

There's a whole shedload of ornamentation to got on top of the roof yet.

There's still a lot of work to be done on the ornamentation - including alterations to the ends of the Dutch gable structure, where they actually curve inwards and downwards even though they are tiled. I have to do all the fantastic carvings mounted on the roof (though I may keep it really quite simple so I don't get stuck on this forever)

I think the shading shows better with more natural colours (less contrast and saturation)

Now that's what I was thinking when I said "wedge" shaped.

Hi Jerry :)

The entire roof face below that red line is concave. If you look at the map file that is what those gradations from the outer edge towards that line are all about - gradually darker blues (blue being the colour that defines the pitch of the roof).

I think if I modify it again I will possibly start steeper at the outside edge (start with a darker blue) and achieve the final pitch of the straight part of the roof at a lower point on the slope, so that the roof is straighter from a lower point. Doing that will also have the side effect of making the flying eaves at the corners of the building appear to be more exaggerated.

From above (and its really difficult getting decent pictures of Japanese temples from above online) the flying eaves aren't really all that noticeable. The way we think of them being quite marked is caused by the details we see in the architecture of the structures supporting the eaves from underneath. If you look really carefully at the normal side view shots you get of these temples, though, you will see that the curve isn't really all that massive. The corners are probably only about 5 - 10 degrees off horizontal in most cases, which really isn't enough to throw shadows except at sunset and sunrise.

However, our minds believe that the corners are curved upwards, so its necessary to create the appearance we are expecting by grossly exaggerating the curve.

Looks really good -- feeling highly jealous!!!

here's a link to something you might like.
click on the second to the left small image under the big pic and it shows a 3D, spinnable model of a roman villa. https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-max-roman-villa-rustica/607135

Your maps look like paintings, which is a good thing.

I just thought I'd join in and say how excellent your work is. Not only is the artwork superb but your WIP posts are really useful to others thinking of embarking on such a project. I hope the Roman style roofs come to a fruition soon as I have a project in mind that they would be perfect for. It would be great to see a way we can all share these things with each other.

This is a very crude map I made in 5 minutes flat using a further set of 6 new Japanese Temple buildings I made last night.

There's lots wrong with it, but I'm a bit too tired to re-render it with shorter shadows right now.

The shading on the main building is wrong, and they all need the weathering toned down quite a bit, since its interfering with the shading, but here it is

These are the cropped screen shots of the priory and the cathedral taken from Google ready for use as a blueprint pattern to draw from.

Hmmm....

All worth thinking about, even though it adds to the overall complexity of the set. I suppose that I have already made the larger Japanese Buddhist temple with a set of 6 smaller symbols...

The only problem I can foresee with doing it that way is that there is no way of letting users know how to use the different parts, and even more importantly the internal shadows within the building between the different levels aren't going to be at all easy to replicate if you are trying to put the thing together like a lego set.

the other option is to do away with the VH resolution version, so that there is only a HI, LO and VL version. There's a huge difference in size between VH and HI. Off the top of my head I think its a factor of 10, so the HI res version would only be 2000 pixels long (a perfectly acceptable size for what is an extremely large building)

I'm still thinking about it.

This is a city symbol, so I doubt gargoyles would be visible at just 40 pixels per foot - other than as vague blobs. That would be more something for a dungeon scale set

Note that there are no performance advantage to split a symbol into multiple parts, the only reason to do that is to let users have flexibility in their use. Loading two images will actually take more resources than loading a single large one.

And the ratio between VH:HI:LO:VL are 50:20:5:1

On a more positive note, because I've done most of the work in CC3 itself (including the map file), as soon as I get a better PC I should theoretically be able to export it at the larger size - if the larger size is acceptable to everyone :)

Posted By: LoopysueHow big is the largest existing PF building symbol - roughly to the closest thousand pixels?

Largest building is about 6k by 4k, but there is also a commercial plane, which is almost like a building, at 9k by 8k.

Yep - its fairly big, Scott. This is the lead roofing texture I made for the job, when it became apparent that most churches in this country are roofed in dirty great big panels of the stuff. Makes you wonder, really, how contaminated the ground water is around these buildings after hundreds of years of just being there.

Remy - that makes me feel much better about the priory now. I might have a go at exporting it in two halves so that I can actually present the full resolution.

pvernon - Wow! That's every bit as big as Salisbury Cathedral! Unfortunately, since I already have an artificial size limit imposed on me by my 1.5GB PC (not much over 10k in either direction), the largest I can export in one go is about 250 feet, which is only half the cathedral at best.

Tons of the stuff in every town in the UK. It wasn't always so. The really old churches have tile or even stone slab rooftops. I'm not sure whether the oldest parts of Christchurch are tile or stone. It was built in 1094 on the site of an even older Saxon church.

What an interesting picture!

Thank you, Andrew :)

I think the trouble with making sets of buildings is that if you add too much in the way of weathering (those white stains for instance where the lime has washed out of cheap cement, or lichen - most rooftops are orange with it around where I live) you make the buildings individually so recognisable that it is hard not to notice its repetition in other places on the map.

Maybe one answer to this problem for people who want photorealism is to make additional transparent symbols that you can use to add staining and plant growth to random rooftops across the map. Its certainly already something I have been thinking about for a while ;)

google translate seems to do a decent job of converting Chinese Glyphs to English
http://www.chinabaike.com/article/sort0525/sort0542/2007/20070731156692.html

Pic is what drew me to the site.

Thanks for doing all that research :)

I'm right on the verge of going to bed, Jerry, so I will have a closer look at those tomorrow again. In the meantime I can say that I have already done most of the roof shapes shown in the image you uploaded ;)

Here are a few that I've found whilst musing on roof shapes.

I'm out of superlatives.

LOL! Thank goodness I'm not the only one! :P

I think its down to having a bit of an unruly imagination.

And thank you! *blushes deeply*

Maybe we have minds that work faster on new scenarios than on the current task in hand :P

I think I tend to do it more if I get stuck and can't figure something out. I usually find that when I've had a little playtime the solution to the original problem seems really obvious.

In this case I was struggling with the roof shading of the torii, which has a roof design that slopes down either side of the ridge, but also tips upwards at either end.

And all because Buddhists believe demons travel in straight lines and are confused and delayed or put off by curves...

Just make sure you live in a curly building and you'll be fine :D

Lovely, but I'm not getting the up-turned corner, or perhaps these don't have them? I think the top ornament would be better as a globe than a square if I'm being picky... The shading is working quite well though, I think. Nice job on a difficult subject.