I've more or less completed the lower half of the area I marked up yesterday (except that because its full of orchards, and the trees aren't there yet it looks a lot too bare), and will move on to hopefully finish the housing altogether in the next version.
Then I just have the trees, tents and boats to sort out
Buildings, textures, roads and paths all finished as far as I am concerned. There may be a long wait for the next version, since now I have the trees, tents and boats to sort out.
This has really turned out nicely. I had thought the "terraces" of elevation were going to look too stark and artificial, but you've proved me wrong. Great work!
Just beautiful. I think Ralf should use your map as a representative of just what this program can do.....People need to see that quality photorealistic maps CAN be made with CC3+ and look just as if not better than some of the maps made in PS or GIMP!
Posted By: BarlimanThis has really turned out nicely. I had thought the "terraces" of elevation were going to look too stark and artificial, but you've proved me wrong. Great work!
Thanks Barliman
I was also insanely worried about the appearance of the terraces, especially when I only added to the "layered Cake" effect by following them with the roads and buildings, but I figure that what's left of the steps will be greatly softened by the addition of trees - of which there will be almost as many as there are houses by the time I'm really finished.
Posted By: LoreleiJust beautiful. I think Ralf should use your map as a representative of just what this program can do.....People need to see that quality photorealistic maps CAN be made with CC3+ and look just as if not better than some of the maps made in PS or GIMP!
Thanks Lorelei
I would be very flattered if he did, but I haven't finished it yet! Who knows what kind of mess I'm going to make of it with the trees!!! LOL
It's been 55 minutes since the last compliment, so now it's time for one from me. This map is really awesome and I've been happily following it's progression. The contours and shading are incredible. It looks like something that has been done in photoshop and has taken at least a year to make. Shows how good CC3 is and indeed how good your mapping skills are. Once again...Awesome
Real estate? Hmmmn. Well... there are a couple of properties that have already been reserved by one of the Community Leaders over on Cartographer's Guild, but I'm sure we can manage to find you one to suit. I have to warn you, however, that it will only be a short tem rental, and that you would be strongly advised to book a place on one of the Merlish fishing boats for the big exodus just before the end of the world
Posted By: LoreleiJust beautiful. I think Ralf should use your map as a representative of just what this program can do.....People need to see that quality photorealistic maps CAN be made with CC3+ and look just as if not better than some of the maps made in PS or GIMP!
I agree. I've known it could do this stuff for a long time now as I went to school for Computer Aided Drafting and Design, which uses FastCAD. And this program is based off of the FastCAD engine. Knowing what FastCAD engine was capable of, I just knew that if someone wanted to put in the effort, CC3+ would produce fantastic results as FastCAD is an incredible program by itself.
Thank you Sue for being the one to prove it. I love how far you've come with this and the results you have gotten from it. I haven't wanted to track all of the sheets and effects, nor experiment with them for fear of somehow breaking my maps, so I'm glad you had the courage to do so.
Now I am beginning to wonder what it can do with maps that are not photorealistic. I've been partial to cartoon art for years but I still like photorealistic as well. Maybe some experimentation is in order.
Posted By: BillOk, with that reply, now I need the novel that goes with that story!
Sorry Bill, I haven't finished it yet, but I'll let you know when I do. Map and novel have somehow managed to become melded into one thing in my head - a bit like conjoined twins, but in such a way that the map has to be completed before I can complete the book
Posted By: tonnichiwa
Posted By: LoreleiJust beautiful. I think Ralf should use your map as a representative of just what this program can do.....People need to see that quality photorealistic maps CAN be made with CC3+ and look just as if not better than some of the maps made in PS or GIMP!
I agree. I've known it could do this stuff for a long time now as I went to school for Computer Aided Drafting and Design, which uses FastCAD. And this program is based off of the FastCAD engine. Knowing what FastCAD engine was capable of, I just knew that if someone wanted to put in the effort, CC3+ would produce fantastic results as FastCAD is an incredible program by itself.
Thank you Sue for being the one to prove it. I love how far you've come with this and the results you have gotten from it. I haven't wanted to track all of the sheets and effects, nor experiment with them for fear of somehow breaking my maps, so I'm glad you had the courage to do so.
Now I am beginning to wonder what it can do with maps that are not photorealistic. I've been partial to cartoon art for years but I still like photorealistic as well. Maybe some experimentation is in order.
Thanks Tonichiwa
Think outside the box. That's the most important thing. And don't start a map by thinking about what you can't do, but by imagining how you want it to look, then striving to achieve that goal, because as you have already said FastCad is unbelievably powerful.
I don't know how much of a shocking revelation this will be to you, but there is at least one thing that PS users find quite difficult to emulate, and that is the Edge Fade, Inner when its set to anything other than the default settings. My ocean, with its fade from 15% opacity to 80% opacity, is far easier in CC3 than it can ever be in PS, and I know that much because I tried really quite hard to help a PS user get to the same point with only limited success - that user being one of the DeviantArt members over at the Guild
That is good to know Sue, I've been wondering what things cc3+ could do that are either more hard in Photoshop or impossible. I'm sure there are more just waiting to be discovered. Admittedly cc3+ is limited by the fact that while it uses FastCAD as a base, it does not have all of the capabilities of FastCAD. It has been tailored specifically for map making, not making the engineering drawings for a Boeing 767 aircraft. Still, that should give us some things that Photoshop or Gimp cannot do or find it hard to do. Now it is just a matter of testing to see what it can really do.
The best bit is I haven't even worked with quite a few of the effects. The bravest I've been so far is to use the RGB Matrix Process to colour the seaweed, which in reality is a partially transparent black and white bitmap
I'm going to have a go with the lighting effects in my next map, which will be of the ruins of Urrowan Palace, where the bi-coloured, shape-shifting were-hawk Zorrani live in exile from the other 4 peoples of Ethran. It's the home of my second protagonist - Astra.
That should be quite an interesting experiment!
Here are the effects I haven't yet explored, highlighted in yellow:
Another winter/dead tree, but not as successful this time. Its meant to be an aspen (or a birch tree, if you prefer), but the smaller spread of the tree when viewed from above, and the finer nature of its structure in comparison to the large oaks I did before means that most of the detail is lost in a map like MC when it doesn't have any foliage on it.
This image is a zoom level too far for the ground textures of the map itself, which are starting to pixelate at this range. The trees are in comparison still very much in focus with some way to go before they start to pixelate. I made them hi-res because I want to be able to use them at any scale I chose in the future - battle maps included.
How crinkly they are is largely a function of how old they are at death and how log ago they died (and how they died, to some extent). What you have there looks plausible for freshly-deceased very old oak trees, probably due to drought or possibly fire (they are a little richly brown for oaks, whose bark tends to go grayish and/or greenish with the accumulation of mosses and other things). As the trees stay dead, they will lose the smaller branches over the years and the bark will get grayer and fall off, leaving the bare wood of the trunk that will silver to the classic gray of old wood with time.
(pardon me while I wander on down the botany trail for a moment) Young trees tend to have straighter branches, as do fast-growing species. A good starting model of a tree branch is a cylinder that grows to a certain length in a year. Come winter, the branch stops growing and produces buds at the tip and a few down the sides that will be where new growth starts (simple model here). Next year, the buds will fight for dominance as to which one gets to grow, with typically the bud getting the most light and nutrients being the one that leads the branch.
The reason that buds are so important is that the growth direction from the previous bud to the new bud is almost always a straight line. If the branch is gnarly and twisted, it's most likely because (a) the tree was growing slowly and (b) the dominance fights were won by lateral buds almost as often as by the terminal bud. Many trees grow more slowly with age, which is a big reason why old trees tend to be more gnarled (quite aside from the fact that the older you get, the more attacks you have survived).
Look at pictures of the Oak Alley plantation in Lousiana for some good examples of 200+ year old oak trees that are well past their primes. They are quite gnarled.
Some trees grow quick and die young, with the aspen family being good examples. A poplar tree (a member of the aspen family widely planted for lumber) grows multiple feet in a year and specimens rarely have time to develop much in the way of lateral branching before they die.
One of the fun things about trees is that if you injure them, the injured parts revert to a young growth pattern. These younger branches are much straighter and more useful as poles than are gnarly old branches. The practice of coppicing takes advantage of this behavior by cutting off trees near the ground, forcing susceptible species to regrow as a group of closely-spaced young and straight trees from the severed trunk and sometimes from the near-surface roots as well. Do this to a small wooded area and it's usually referred to as a copse, especially if the harvest occurs at regular intervals over a long time.
Aspens are the champions of this root-sprouting behavior, allowing a single individual to sprout from the roots as well as stumps in areas which have been cleared by natural forces such as fire or avalanche; some aspen individuals cover many acres. Sadly, aspen wood is fairly weak in absolute terms. I once had a neighbor cut down a largish cottonwood tree (in the aspen family) and three weeks later my whole backyard was a forest of tiny cottonwood trees because my yard (and my water and my fertilizer) had been maintaining a huge network of barely subsurface cottonwood roots. When the suppression of the above-ground stems was removed, the roots that were within sigh of sunlight suddenly burst into life as new stems. It took a couple of months of chopping those shoots down every week until the roots starved to keep the jungle at bay.
Humans also like pretty new growth for specimen trees as well. You have likely seen trees where they are cut back to stubby branches every year and every year the tree puts out hundreds of new branches, giving a lovely green puffball (the fruitless mulberry is a popular tree for this here in the US). This practice of cutting back the tree is called pollarding and it can give a good crop of new and straight poles every year that are ten feet or so long and an inch or so in diameter if the tree species is chosen correctly. If you stop pollarding a tree after you start, it quickly develops a very odd-looking growth habit because the tree can't sustain that number of branches indefinitely. Based on the one tree that I have in my front yard that was mistreated in this manner, you get an ugly tangle of branches that is difficult to rehabilitate.
That's probably enough now. I do like hear myself type, though.
The aspen tree would look better if it was under the taller trees, I think.
You may have also gone a bit too dark with the self-shadowing of the branches. That dark of a color would work when there are leaves on the tree, but is probably too strong for just empty branches.
Comments
I've more or less completed the lower half of the area I marked up yesterday (except that because its full of orchards, and the trees aren't there yet it looks a lot too bare), and will move on to hopefully finish the housing altogether in the next version.
Then I just have the trees, tents and boats to sort out
Buildings, textures, roads and paths all finished as far as I am concerned. There may be a long wait for the next version, since now I have the trees, tents and boats to sort out.
I was also insanely worried about the appearance of the terraces, especially when I only added to the "layered Cake" effect by following them with the roads and buildings, but I figure that what's left of the steps will be greatly softened by the addition of trees - of which there will be almost as many as there are houses by the time I'm really finished. Thanks Lorelei
I would be very flattered if he did, but I haven't finished it yet! Who knows what kind of mess I'm going to make of it with the trees!!! LOL
Don't know what to say - other than THANK YOU - all of you
(and now I really DO hope the trees are going to come out all right, or you'll all be real disappointed! LOL)
Awesome job!
Real estate? Hmmmn. Well... there are a couple of properties that have already been reserved by one of the Community Leaders over on Cartographer's Guild, but I'm sure we can manage to find you one to suit. I have to warn you, however, that it will only be a short tem rental, and that you would be strongly advised to book a place on one of the Merlish fishing boats for the big exodus just before the end of the world
Thank you Sue for being the one to prove it. I love how far you've come with this and the results you have gotten from it. I haven't wanted to track all of the sheets and effects, nor experiment with them for fear of somehow breaking my maps, so I'm glad you had the courage to do so.
Now I am beginning to wonder what it can do with maps that are not photorealistic. I've been partial to cartoon art for years but I still like photorealistic as well. Maybe some experimentation is in order.
Think outside the box. That's the most important thing. And don't start a map by thinking about what you can't do, but by imagining how you want it to look, then striving to achieve that goal, because as you have already said FastCad is unbelievably powerful.
I don't know how much of a shocking revelation this will be to you, but there is at least one thing that PS users find quite difficult to emulate, and that is the Edge Fade, Inner when its set to anything other than the default settings. My ocean, with its fade from 15% opacity to 80% opacity, is far easier in CC3 than it can ever be in PS, and I know that much because I tried really quite hard to help a PS user get to the same point with only limited success - that user being one of the DeviantArt members over at the Guild
I'm going to have a go with the lighting effects in my next map, which will be of the ruins of Urrowan Palace, where the bi-coloured, shape-shifting were-hawk Zorrani live in exile from the other 4 peoples of Ethran. It's the home of my second protagonist - Astra.
That should be quite an interesting experiment!
Here are the effects I haven't yet explored, highlighted in yellow:
Working on the variations now...
:-)
This image is a zoom level too far for the ground textures of the map itself, which are starting to pixelate at this range. The trees are in comparison still very much in focus with some way to go before they start to pixelate. I made them hi-res because I want to be able to use them at any scale I chose in the future - battle maps included.
(pardon me while I wander on down the botany trail for a moment)
Young trees tend to have straighter branches, as do fast-growing species. A good starting model of a tree branch is a cylinder that grows to a certain length in a year. Come winter, the branch stops growing and produces buds at the tip and a few down the sides that will be where new growth starts (simple model here). Next year, the buds will fight for dominance as to which one gets to grow, with typically the bud getting the most light and nutrients being the one that leads the branch.
The reason that buds are so important is that the growth direction from the previous bud to the new bud is almost always a straight line. If the branch is gnarly and twisted, it's most likely because (a) the tree was growing slowly and (b) the dominance fights were won by lateral buds almost as often as by the terminal bud. Many trees grow more slowly with age, which is a big reason why old trees tend to be more gnarled (quite aside from the fact that the older you get, the more attacks you have survived).
Look at pictures of the Oak Alley plantation in Lousiana for some good examples of 200+ year old oak trees that are well past their primes. They are quite gnarled.
Some trees grow quick and die young, with the aspen family being good examples. A poplar tree (a member of the aspen family widely planted for lumber) grows multiple feet in a year and specimens rarely have time to develop much in the way of lateral branching before they die.
One of the fun things about trees is that if you injure them, the injured parts revert to a young growth pattern. These younger branches are much straighter and more useful as poles than are gnarly old branches. The practice of coppicing takes advantage of this behavior by cutting off trees near the ground, forcing susceptible species to regrow as a group of closely-spaced young and straight trees from the severed trunk and sometimes from the near-surface roots as well. Do this to a small wooded area and it's usually referred to as a copse, especially if the harvest occurs at regular intervals over a long time.
Aspens are the champions of this root-sprouting behavior, allowing a single individual to sprout from the roots as well as stumps in areas which have been cleared by natural forces such as fire or avalanche; some aspen individuals cover many acres. Sadly, aspen wood is fairly weak in absolute terms. I once had a neighbor cut down a largish cottonwood tree (in the aspen family) and three weeks later my whole backyard was a forest of tiny cottonwood trees because my yard (and my water and my fertilizer) had been maintaining a huge network of barely subsurface cottonwood roots. When the suppression of the above-ground stems was removed, the roots that were within sigh of sunlight suddenly burst into life as new stems. It took a couple of months of chopping those shoots down every week until the roots starved to keep the jungle at bay.
Humans also like pretty new growth for specimen trees as well. You have likely seen trees where they are cut back to stubby branches every year and every year the tree puts out hundreds of new branches, giving a lovely green puffball (the fruitless mulberry is a popular tree for this here in the US). This practice of cutting back the tree is called pollarding and it can give a good crop of new and straight poles every year that are ten feet or so long and an inch or so in diameter if the tree species is chosen correctly. If you stop pollarding a tree after you start, it quickly develops a very odd-looking growth habit because the tree can't sustain that number of branches indefinitely. Based on the one tree that I have in my front yard that was mistreated in this manner, you get an ugly tangle of branches that is difficult to rehabilitate.
That's probably enough now. I do like hear myself type, though.
You may have also gone a bit too dark with the self-shadowing of the branches. That dark of a color would work when there are leaves on the tree, but is probably too strong for just empty branches.