Port City of Dwyer
With one Battle map under my belt, its time I start a city build so jump in comment, critique, encourage as you see fit.
This is my general rough out for a moderately large port city linking the primary trade route between two large land masses. As I post I will add more detail of my world, its culture and such, building the story for you as my map progresses.
CC3+ Experience: 4 Weeks
Build Environment: CC3+, CD3+, DD3+, Perspectives, SS1,2&4, Annuals 2102,2015,2016, Bogie, CSUAC, Vintryri, and a few hand drawn Bitmaps and the Tome of Ultimate Mapping.
Map Spec: City Builder CC3+, 10,000*8,000, Scale 1.0
Cheers,
Bill
This is my general rough out for a moderately large port city linking the primary trade route between two large land masses. As I post I will add more detail of my world, its culture and such, building the story for you as my map progresses.
CC3+ Experience: 4 Weeks
Build Environment: CC3+, CD3+, DD3+, Perspectives, SS1,2&4, Annuals 2102,2015,2016, Bogie, CSUAC, Vintryri, and a few hand drawn Bitmaps and the Tome of Ultimate Mapping.
Map Spec: City Builder CC3+, 10,000*8,000, Scale 1.0
Cheers,
Bill
Comments
Why are you starting with a dark background?
1. It links back to 35 years of miniature painting using a dark base.
2. I have an engineers mind and I start from the dirt up. (I would use dark grey for bedrock but rule 1 above overrides that, lol).
Attached is the water rough in.
Bill
Please don't take offence - I love the ocean, and I'm already hooked on the progress of this map... but I'm not that keen on the gridded appearance of that sand texture. Is it at some impossibly tiny scale or something?
I really needed the general area visualized to help work the prime city area so I can ensure correct story elements are met. To be honest I am still struggling with the whole scale topic and the application. Its not the applications fault its 100% me and my method. I may try and chop it into 4 quads and work them separately...not sure at this point.
Below is a zoomed screen snap of the island to give you a better idea of scale vs fill size. Its still in a rough-in state but much cleaner to visualize than the big pic.
Im going to ponder my dilemma tonight and see what I want to do. Worse case its a learning experiance!
Bill
How about creating it as a reference map - a detailed one, but not so much that you can zoom in infinitely the way you seem to want to do.
That way you could use the textures at a larger scale in this map so that they look right when viewing the whole map.
You could then do a collection of new smaller scale maps (that's a zoom in by the way, since the smaller the scale the larger the map) to cover areas of particular interest.
But please don't cut up this lovely map!
Just for fun I exported the file to AutoCAD and opened it in my AutoCad 2016. It strips the fills and gives you a cool line topo look..
Bill
Though it has a strange beauty of its own. Why don't you do one when you've finished the map?
Bill
Bill
How do you mean "great exports"?
Bill
Then I give the map unit coordinates of the bottom left corner and the top right corner, since the bottom left corner is usually 0,0, and the top right corner is usually the number of map units wide and tall - easier to remember and get right. Having a frame might mean that you have to subtract the width of the frame from the bottom left corner, and add it to the top right one.
I export at a size that is at least twice the height and width of the image I want to end up with (for example if I want to post a map here I export at least 2048 pixels wide so that I can reduce it by half to fit 1024. I frequently export it at a much greater scale and reduce it much further than 50%, simply because I use the same export to create the images for both this forum and Cartographer's Guild. Its just that the one at CG can be a lot larger than the one I post here
I downsample the exported image (bicubic downsampling of course) using Corel Photopaint. Most graphics packages can do a decent downsample, and doing it outside CC3 increases the speed of the render (because you don't then need to have any antialiasing switched on while you render), and it allows you to have more control over what kind of downsampling you wish to use.
Have I left anything out?
Excellent how to though thanks,
Bill