Just wait till Sanctuary is invaded by the new flying machines being developed in Stromphe in SW Artemisia. LOL Regardless, even without gunpowder, I am sure wizards will have fun with variants of Lightning Strike and Fireball, not to mention flying mages with a bucket of unpleasant material to drop on walled cities. Perhaps walls are not so necessary in a magic civilization (unless magic is very uncommon and not state controlled.)
This is the whole map - a colour check, though please bear in mind there are no hedges, walls, country lanes, farms ponds irrigation systems or any other details added to the surrounding countryside, so it does look a bit harsh and unnatural at the moment.
I like the colours this way, but I'm open to suggestions :)
I'll just be over here picking my jaw up off the table. Sue, you have the makings of a most epic map here and I couldn't be happier it's on my continent of Malajuri! I can already see the adventures my players will have in this spectacular city!
There's a bevel on each of the four sheets that make up the landmass, and there's a bevel on the dyke under the wall. The relief shading, however, is not a bevel.
Now that I am looking at this I see the four sheets that make up the landmass and I now see that you must have drawn in the relief shading somehow? Did you use Gimp for that? I never thought of stacking land like that to create that effect. I'm going to steal it.
You don't have to steal anything. Its for the Community Atlas, so eventually everyone will be able to dissect it to their heart's content (and probably discover that I'm not the world's tidiest mapper) ;)
If you want to get a head start on it, though, Draw/Offset is your friend where the cliffs are concerned ;)
Because its for the Atlas there's nothing in this map that isn't CC3+. Once its been finished and uploaded the add ons you will need to see it are CD3 and Bogies Mapping Objects. There are also 4 fills and a very small set of trees already included in the Malajuri folder in the Atlas which I created specially for this map.
The relief is very crude - a single sheet with a gargantuan blur (1000 map units), and a Blend Mode effect set to Overlay, with a handful of equally gargantuan black and white polygons drawn on it. At least some of the relief around that collapsed cavern is generated by other illusion work - the roads have a tendency to follow the contours of the hill that isn't really there, and by the time I'm properly finished with it there will be lots of other little clues to trick the eye into seeing the hill.
This is a screen shot of the relief sheet with the effects turned off on that sheet. Now you can see what I mean when I say that its pretty crude.
Sue, I keep looking at the colors you're using - purple, bright orange, neon green - and I'll admit that it boggles my brain a bit as to how you'll turn this psychedelic patchwork into a city. LOL However, I know that whatever you do with it will look amazing. Your maps are always stunningly beautiful.
I will be watching this closely because I have a feeling that I'll be learning a lot about the use of color from you.
I have a feeling I'm going to learn quite a bit as well ;)
These are only colour swatches at the moment - a bit like when you go to the DIY store and bring home a rainbow of shades and paint them on the wall in a clashing tartan.
The fields need more texture, so I will probably experiment with a few partitive colour ideas to suggest furrows and things as well as an average colour. Then there are all the details to go in - farms, tracks, double hedgerows, stone walls, etc, which should break it up even more.
I'm thinking of going a whole load more detailed on the relief sheet as well, to add more interesting details of gullies and so on.
All these colours are created on a single sheet with a Blend Mode set to Colour Burn and 20% opacity. they are the palest shades of nearly every colour in the default palette, which means... since I've just discovered that I could alter the palette and attach it to the drawing, I could also try harmonising them that way as well.
The amount of lavender oil that's sold online these days, I'm surprised they aren't more common than they are.
It would have been an important plant in medieval times. Its healing powers are real, since it happens to be a brilliant antibacterial/antifungal/antiviral agent, not to mention the even stranger power it seems to have to heal burns pretty fast. Maybe its because nothing can grow in the wound and trigger the formation of scar tissue.
So. There's lots of lavender growing in the immediate vicinity.
Its relatively easy to fill the entire city with automatic houses using the House and Street commands, but without these special buildings it all gets a bit... samey.
Its also a lot more fun if you get just a bit more inventive ;)
The entire dome is the CD3 Slate fill. The depth of the blue is caused by an HSL effect I have in play on that sheet to darken and dim down the bright almost glowing blue of that texture, and the differences in the blue are entirely down to the shading of the polygons.
The drawing was easy. It was calculating the angles that was difficult. I hate maths, so I ended up doing it all by drawing the side view profile of the dome to scale and taking the bearing of each segment from that drawing to dictate the angle for setting the shaded polygon. That's a bit of a simplification, because it took hours working out how to draw the profile (its all down to circles that fit tightly in hexagons), never mind doing all the measurements and working out how wide each segment should be.
I've found a different use for the same basic shape...
For a while now I've been wondering how to depict a high density population in the elf districts while maintaining their principles of living by nature and not destroying it. I've probably broken all the rules by doing this, but taking the essence of the concept from Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle I've got them using their magic to grow "Turnip Palms", which have a grossly distended base to the trunk - big enough to hollow out and use as a decent sized home. Later, when the tree comes to the end of its life, the top dies away and the trunk turns to stone.
The Turnip Palms are my own idea - an extension of Paolini's idea that the elf dwellings where grown by singing the trees into the right shape.
In this small trial zone you can see most of the turnip palm homes are quite old and have died down to leave the stoney turnip-shaped home they are grown for, while at the bottom of the picture there are younger turnip palms. Hollowing out the main trunk while the tree is still alive, or causing it to grow hollow in the first place, means that elf families can take up residence within 50 years of planting the palm - sooner, if their magic is strong enough to accelerate the growth of the palm.
(Ok, now is when everyone shouts at me for breaking all the preconceived ideas about what elf dwellings should look like :P )
Absolutely LOVE it. These round bathhouses/elfin buildings would make awesome additions to a symbol pack (Community Pack?) as I'm sure loads of people would love to have and use them! You could use the same basic idea for hot-air balloons, as well, and could create great fantasy airships, etc. (HINT! LOL!)...
If I wasn't doing this for the Atlas and restricting myself to using the same things that everyone else has available then I would have created a new symbol set. It would have been less taxing on the RAM than having all these thousands of shaded polys in the map. Maybe by the time I've finished doing Sanctuary I will have enough time to consider doing an actual symbol set. I also need to consider that this map needs to be 'ready to go', when its finished, completely independently of whether the community art pack is available by then or not - so its just safer to do it this way for now ;)
At the risk of using the same thing for too many different jobs, I'm going to add a set of dome 'reading rooms' to the city library.
I'll also be making some much more simple 5 sided onion domes for Witchhaven. Who says only wizards need towers? Wizards live there as well, of course, but they are vastly outnumbered by the witches, which is why its called 'Witchaven', not 'Wizard Towers'
Comments
I was just getting into that! LOL!
You write very interestingly, Joe. I don't know how you do it, since most factual books have the unfortunate tendency to bore the pants off me! LOL!
Regardless, even without gunpowder, I am sure wizards will have fun with variants of Lightning Strike and Fireball, not to mention flying mages with a bucket of unpleasant material to drop on walled cities. Perhaps walls are not so necessary in a magic civilization (unless magic is very uncommon and not state controlled.)
We have our own wizards, mages, witches and elves!
And I've seen with my own eyes things just kind of bounce off some kind of invisible dome that seems to cover the city.
I like the colours this way, but I'm open to suggestions :)
Its too red and lots too bright, and all the colours are too solid right now. I'm just trying them all out like paint swatches on a wall ;)
Thank you, Lorelei. You are too kind :D
Ummm…. LOL! Which ones!!!!
There's a bevel on each of the four sheets that make up the landmass, and there's a bevel on the dyke under the wall. The relief shading, however, is not a bevel.
If you want to get a head start on it, though, Draw/Offset is your friend where the cliffs are concerned ;)
Because its for the Atlas there's nothing in this map that isn't CC3+. Once its been finished and uploaded the add ons you will need to see it are CD3 and Bogies Mapping Objects. There are also 4 fills and a very small set of trees already included in the Malajuri folder in the Atlas which I created specially for this map.
The relief is very crude - a single sheet with a gargantuan blur (1000 map units), and a Blend Mode effect set to Overlay, with a handful of equally gargantuan black and white polygons drawn on it. At least some of the relief around that collapsed cavern is generated by other illusion work - the roads have a tendency to follow the contours of the hill that isn't really there, and by the time I'm properly finished with it there will be lots of other little clues to trick the eye into seeing the hill.
This is a screen shot of the relief sheet with the effects turned off on that sheet. Now you can see what I mean when I say that its pretty crude.
I will be watching this closely because I have a feeling that I'll be learning a lot about the use of color from you.
I have a feeling I'm going to learn quite a bit as well ;)
These are only colour swatches at the moment - a bit like when you go to the DIY store and bring home a rainbow of shades and paint them on the wall in a clashing tartan.
The fields need more texture, so I will probably experiment with a few partitive colour ideas to suggest furrows and things as well as an average colour. Then there are all the details to go in - farms, tracks, double hedgerows, stone walls, etc, which should break it up even more.
I'm thinking of going a whole load more detailed on the relief sheet as well, to add more interesting details of gullies and so on.
All these colours are created on a single sheet with a Blend Mode set to Colour Burn and 20% opacity. they are the palest shades of nearly every colour in the default palette, which means... since I've just discovered that I could alter the palette and attach it to the drawing, I could also try harmonising them that way as well.
It would have been an important plant in medieval times. Its healing powers are real, since it happens to be a brilliant antibacterial/antifungal/antiviral agent, not to mention the even stranger power it seems to have to heal burns pretty fast. Maybe its because nothing can grow in the wound and trigger the formation of scar tissue.
So. There's lots of lavender growing in the immediate vicinity.
This is a day's work (the blue dome). Its a shaded poly onion dome with roof ridges - made for Sanctuary's public bath house.
So the day was worth it - thanks ;)
Its relatively easy to fill the entire city with automatic houses using the House and Street commands, but without these special buildings it all gets a bit... samey.
Its also a lot more fun if you get just a bit more inventive ;)
The entire dome is the CD3 Slate fill. The depth of the blue is caused by an HSL effect I have in play on that sheet to darken and dim down the bright almost glowing blue of that texture, and the differences in the blue are entirely down to the shading of the polygons.
The drawing was easy. It was calculating the angles that was difficult. I hate maths, so I ended up doing it all by drawing the side view profile of the dome to scale and taking the bearing of each segment from that drawing to dictate the angle for setting the shaded polygon. That's a bit of a simplification, because it took hours working out how to draw the profile (its all down to circles that fit tightly in hexagons), never mind doing all the measurements and working out how wide each segment should be.
I've found a different use for the same basic shape...
For a while now I've been wondering how to depict a high density population in the elf districts while maintaining their principles of living by nature and not destroying it. I've probably broken all the rules by doing this, but taking the essence of the concept from Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle I've got them using their magic to grow "Turnip Palms", which have a grossly distended base to the trunk - big enough to hollow out and use as a decent sized home. Later, when the tree comes to the end of its life, the top dies away and the trunk turns to stone.
The Turnip Palms are my own idea - an extension of Paolini's idea that the elf dwellings where grown by singing the trees into the right shape.
In this small trial zone you can see most of the turnip palm homes are quite old and have died down to leave the stoney turnip-shaped home they are grown for, while at the bottom of the picture there are younger turnip palms. Hollowing out the main trunk while the tree is still alive, or causing it to grow hollow in the first place, means that elf families can take up residence within 50 years of planting the palm - sooner, if their magic is strong enough to accelerate the growth of the palm.
(Ok, now is when everyone shouts at me for breaking all the preconceived ideas about what elf dwellings should look like :P )
I'm glad you like them :)
If I wasn't doing this for the Atlas and restricting myself to using the same things that everyone else has available then I would have created a new symbol set. It would have been less taxing on the RAM than having all these thousands of shaded polys in the map. Maybe by the time I've finished doing Sanctuary I will have enough time to consider doing an actual symbol set. I also need to consider that this map needs to be 'ready to go', when its finished, completely independently of whether the community art pack is available by then or not - so its just safer to do it this way for now ;)
I'll also be making some much more simple 5 sided onion domes for Witchhaven. Who says only wizards need towers? Wizards live there as well, of course, but they are vastly outnumbered by the witches, which is why its called 'Witchaven', not 'Wizard Towers'