Unnamed city in progress
Don Anderson Jr.
Mapmaker
Well this is the city I have been working on for both my personal project and our DM's campaign world.
It's about 3 100 buildings (population base 38 000). May hit a bit more with surrounding farmland and such.
Still have to add some more vegetation and some more effects. I'm pretty happy with it so far.
From a distance it looks, pretty decent. But when zoomed in to block level I am pretty impressed with how it's turned out. Used so many symbol and tons of sheets and effects so far.
It's so resource heavy it strains my machine, when zoomed into a small area with all symbols and effects on. So I was deciding to divided it into sectors and @Loopysue's input convinced me it was the right path, but extra work.
So a day or three to finish vegetation. Maybe add some more effects. (all the path's to buildings was pretty killer project in itself. I don't even know how many different fills and scales I used for all of them)
Used @Monsen's CC3 tools and his amazing Annual 129 Large Exports. Thanks for those. I need to change the map border or screen as he says to try limit all the backgound map that it reads, When I export the next pass. The first export was 400MB. Might even scale it up further for the next export.
Comments
Here is a block level image of the city bazaar/market.
This is just South of the Red City Court's. Across the swampy river. You can see the big blue tent.
This is great. I have a couple of large cities that I’m planning to do, and have been pondering approaches. Using separate layers for each neighborhood sounds like a good idea, and I will study CA129. I think I may do one in SS5 and the other in Darklands City. Any tips — anything you wish you had done along the way or before getting started?
Customizing fills and organizing them was something I started halfway through. I should have started at the get go.
The aforementioned separating layers was a big one.
I should have discarded unused sheets at the start. Then just add as needed. Probably have tons that are redundant, with probably only a few things on each.
Messed up the city scale, but Monsen's CC3 tools will let me correct that later.
I'm calling it done.
There are a few minor symbol placement issues. Daughter wanted me to change the swamp to green. I am a traditionalist from way way back in the day when swamps were purple hex's.
File size is 822 KB
22 000 objects. This overall view is ok, but man it looks so good at street level. putting in all the path's to houses was a real chore.
I did one render pass 400 MB file size. Going to try that again with the finished copy, and then maybe even do a more massive one.
Oooh just realized trees don't have shadows.
Very impressive!