Sector 15 - Errahum Ward and the Borough of Lurkin
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
This is part of a city map I am working on with a group of other cartographers over at Cartographer's Guild.
Sector 15 is divided into two distinct areas - Errahum Ward, inside the city wall, and the Borough of Lurkin, outside the city wall.
This thread is about watching the map develop
Errahum Ward:
[Image_7455]
The Borough of Lurkin:
Sector 15 is divided into two distinct areas - Errahum Ward, inside the city wall, and the Borough of Lurkin, outside the city wall.
This thread is about watching the map develop
Errahum Ward:
[Image_7455]
The Borough of Lurkin:
Comments
I've a lot more work to do yet - and that's just the relief shading! LOL!
I'm having a bit of a hard time with the relief at the moment. I may have to try something a bit different, but we'll see how its going by tomorrow
Since I really want this map to look utterly fantastic, even though the bevels aren't actually doing what I want them to do... I'm wondering if it would be considered heretical of me to do this really complicated relief as a flat GIMP image, which I can then use as the background for the CC3 map.
Has anyone ever made a CC3 map that way before?
This is the sort relief I'm talking about...
[Image_7458]
And this is the kind of relief shading I was dreaming of when I started with the bevels, but which sadly I can't seem to get right, using only bevels.
The relief of the little cliff island with the Mayor's house on it is part of the background bitmap, while everything else is CC3, and on top of that - including the shadow cast by the mesa.
I've done similar relief cliffs using GIMP to create a bitmap like you did. If it's shading you're after, did you look at my An overview of the Blend Mode, Overlay Effect article ?
I confess to downloading them and meaning to read them, but with one thing and another (keeping momentum going on all the projects I'm involved with while simultaneously doing a crash course in GIMP and how to use a brand new tablet), I haven't read them yet - which is disgraceful, since by all the things I've been referred to you for solutions over the last couple of months I should know by now that you are one of the best!
Its a comfort to know that I'm not the only one who wants to go further than a straightforward bevel, even though plenty of people have said how nice they look... To me they are too precise and angular for the kind of map I'm trying to draw. I got away with it on my Atlas Ward map, but on that one most of them faced away from the sun, so it was a lot easier to add in a few shadows where things didn't look quite right, because I didn't have to worry about what the sunlit side actually looked like (which would have been pretty rubbish with all the really dark glows I had to employ to get the shaded side right). I had to use about a gazillion sheets to do what I did, and spent days fiddling around with the sheet effects to get everything 'just so'. This map is far bigger (about 3-4 times the area and practically mountainous to boot). There are tons of rock formations to sort out, and I just don't have the time to mess and mess again with multiple sheets, knowing that whatever I do I can only ever come to a compromise between what looks right on the sunlit side, and what looks right on the shaded side. I need to just draw it straight and get it done, so that its all on one sheet and I don't end up permanently confused by forgetting which sheet is what, and having to spend hours just trying to remember how I did something so I can do another one in a different part of the map. So I came up with the bitmap background solution - draw once and forget the hassle.
Its not that I'm being lazy. I'm just very stressed and pressured right now to hold up my end of the Guild City project - to wave the flag for CC3 and Profantasy over at the Guild. Atlas Ward was a good start, but this will be the 'piece de resistance' (I hope!)
I'm going to pause in my cliff drawings right now, and go and have a read of those two articles you gave us
I think the bevels in that extract above have a small smoothing effect on them - maybe 1 or 2? Can't remember without opening up again, and I'm nearly going to bed now.
The bevels are fine if you want regular granite like slabs that are the same profile all the way around, but this map needs something relatively delicate and crinkly in a rounded style that would probably be nearly impossible without some very, very advanced bevel technology. I don't think anyone has ever written a bevel like that even in the pro versions of PS or even any of the 3D apps like Blender or Vue. I guess that's why everyone draws their cliffs by hand.
If this was possible by bevel alone I imagine you would need to be able to draw your own bevel profile on a curve diagram, and then on top of that you would need to tell the process to randomly vary that profile (intense and highly variable noise in the profile) to prevent a straight 'ringed' effect like one of those fancy picture frames, and I think that might be just a bit beyond a vector programme without a completely unrealistic processing overhead.
The other reason I've turned to hand drawing these cliffs is that I have to use 4 sheets per bevelled level to stop the transparency acne giving me a dimply map - one bevel sheet, one masking sheet above that to hide the hard line of the top edge, and a lining sheet for each of those two sheets to prevent the acne - the transparency acne I most likely cause by doing silly/weird/unusual things with this software
The transparency acne is a limitation of the software technique for determining transparency, unfortunately.
And for those without artistic ability to do hand drawing, it's possible to get interesting results using generative software, which includes Wilbur (I'm pretty much a one-trick pony and this it). The attached image shows something that I made in Wilbur using a couple of altitude masks, erosion, and thresholding. The individual elements shown on the right were assembled in Photoshop to get the final composite. I'm not sure that the entire process is amenable to an CC3+ effect, but I think that some of the elements might be. It would probably take too many sheets, though.
I like the lighted one. That would probably work quite well for what I'm trying to achieve, but I am also very much a one trick pony - CC3+... well, maybe two tricks, but my version of Corel Photopaint squabbles over memory allocation with Win 10 too frequently to be reliable enough to use for anything more than a 5 minute fun break any more... GIMP - well, I don't understand the software at all. Its nowhere near as logical and easy to use as Photopaint and all I can do with it to date is what you see above - draw some ink lines on a normal blend layer, and use 2 layers of overlay mode shading
Don't have the money for PS!
I use Photoshop mostly because I have had one version or another since the 90s and it's pretty familiar; there isn't anything here that couldn't be done directly in CC3 and Wilbur without involving Photoshop at all.
It's always a happy day when you figure out how to do something new, especially after wrangling with bizarre and unrelated issues, like the UI in GIMP. That was a bit harsh. The UI in GIMP is fine; my problems with it are a matter of expectations and training. As the popular user interface designer quote goes: "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned."
I could use a good example of a drawing that shows obvious transparency acne to see if a code fix that I have in mind would work as well as I hope. It would be a couple of extra milliseconds per frame, but I think that it might eliminate the issue entirely.
The worst thing about GIMP is the way the different tabs are so volatile. I accidentally moved or closed something earlier today (far far too easily in my opinion) - the brush settings, and it took me ages to work out what to do to get it back again, even though its not that deeply buried in the interface. I now no longer trust that things are going to be where I put them when I open up, which doesn't do a lot for getting people to like the software. There are no 'are you sure you want to close this tab' messages, and no warning that you've just actually pulled something out of place. It just happens, and there's no undo button for the arrangement of the GUI. You just have to work out how to put it back together again all by yourself. And if there's a 'save this arrangement' button somewhere, I've no idea where to find it! LOL!
I will see if I can do a quick transparency acne setup for you
Where I need the hi res background image for CC3 so that it doesn't look fuzzy compared to the rendered CC3 symbols and fills, GIMP is actually working at the extremity of its capacity (where CC3 is perfectly fine with having 2 x 10,000 pi square images pasted into the file - its not even breaking a sweat over it - positively 'cocking its hat' in fact!). GIMP is taking nearly ten seconds to react to input (and frequently freezes for up to 10 minutes at a time) with just one of those two 10,000 pi files open, so next time I hear someone saying "CC3s really slow isn't it?", I'll tell them its a lot darned faster than doing a map at half the level of detail in GIMP! LOL!
It occurred to me that the kind of terrain I'm trying to represent did not require me to show slopes, since the landscape is a terraced set of plateaus raised by vertical (or more or less vertical) cliffs. I only have to show the difference in level, which I hope is achieved in the tiny island test spot on the map (same island as last time)
Let me know what you think
These things will only become clear once I start doing landscape type drawings as part of the illustrations that go with the map. All such things are going to be hyperlinked from the main city map, so they're worth doing.
This isn't really relevant to the CC3 forum, so there will now be a rather long gap in time before I'm back on this thread again, since doing this kind of thing takes ages:
[Image_7474]
I will be back, though, since this is only the background. I'll be doing the houses and trees and everything else in CC3
Finally, you decided to use gimp instead of Krita, even if you seem to hate it? Can you tell us what was your decision based on?
The little part you are showing us looks very promising. Have you tried to add some CC3 symbols on top of it? I'm afraid that such a soft and organic style might conflict with sharp symbols as provided by CC3...
Krita is nicer to use with the tablet, but it can't handle a really big image. I was working with an image that was not quite 10,000 pi square with 7 layers in GIMP, but the very same image crashed Krita with only 2 layers. I had to CTRL+ALT+DEL my way out of it in the end as it completely froze up the system.
The 'softness' of this trial piece reflects the fact that what you are looking at is only a screen shot and not fully zoomed in to 100%. I calculated the resolution for the background bitmap by rendering the paper I've drawn it on directly out of CC3 at the size of image I wanted as the final map, so the relationship will be 1:1 in terms of the resolution of the background I re-import to CC3 from GIMP, and the resolution of the exported CC3 map. What this means is that there won't be any pixilation of the background (even though its just a bitmap) and the only softness at that point will be softness that I've chosen to put in there on purpose
It has occurred to me that I will not be able to use shadows generated in CC3, or the relief shading of the bitmap background simply won't work - house shadows won't respect the fact that there is actually a cliff in close proximity, for instance. For that reason I will render the buildings sheet on its own once the map is drawn and import that render as a new layer into the original GIMP file, mask out the white background, and sandwich a hand drawn shadow layer between the houses and the background bitmap - thereby making full use of the CC3 roof shading, and hopefully blending the houses into the GIMP background by giving them believable natural looking shadows.
It sounds really complicated, but in my mind the only difficult thing is going to be getting the background to look good - like a real(ish) landscape, in the first place - this first part of the job
I've decided on a different method after all, and I've no idea if the building will end up with its feet on the top or down the side now