Slight tweak. Something was bothering me with some of the houses southwest of the circular part of the canals. Upon inspection, I discovered that those houses built with the Random Streets tool ended up on the BUILDINGS HIGHER sheet. I removed them entirely and replaced them with the house symbols on the appropriate BUILDINGS sheet. Let me know if you see anything else that looks off.

I redid the southern forest for the first map. I deleted the original blocks of mixed forest trees but kept the semi-transparent gray forest background, and then added a few thousand individual trees. Mostly deciduous and pine, with a healthy smattering of different-colored fruit trees along with a handful of barren trees and a surprise or two. There's something very peaceful about placing all of them individually -- though maybe that's easier to say when there's "only" 2,371 trees and not 41,000!

Here's a close-up of a bit of the forest.

On to the other map!

Made some tweaks to the second floor. I forgot that I planned to have a smaller family dining area on this floor. Ended up converting the office to a small dining room, as it has a nice fireplace and seemed cozier than the solarium. The head of household can do their books and office work in the library. Rearranged the appurtenant WC so that it's accessed from the hallway rather than the dining room. Still haven't figured out the white line with the paths (under the steps leading to the servants' area on the first floor).

Slight tweak. I started to work on the interiors, but as I was working on the church, I decided that I really needed to add a few belltowers because it was the only place I could work out getting stairs up to the balcony at the rear (entrance side) of the church. Added some labels while I was at it, but only on the daytime map. Maybe I will be able to get some interiors posted before the end of the weekend.

Here's the other map. Much smaller southern forest. This map has 2,380 trees -- nine more than the map above.

Finally had a chance today to add some names and some trees.

Before attempting to do my entire Earth-sized world in the new Birdseye Continental style, I wanted to practice on a smaller bit of land, the tried-and-true Republic of Lumadair. I find it helpful to have the exact same FT export used for so many different styles -- I can toggle through JPGs of all of them while the coastlines remain identical, for better comparison.

I won't have time to do more work on it for several more hours (it's the start of my workday here on the Pacific coast), but I figured in the meantime I would seek feedback on my progress so far.

First, for perspective: Lumadair is in an equatorial climate. Very equatorial. Fractal Terrains tells me that the equator runs right through the middle of it. The latitude runs from -10 degrees on the southern side to +10 degrees on the northern side. Here it is circled on a map of my campaign world:

(After doing some terraforming to turn some landlocked great lakes into seas connected to the oceans, I made some adjustments to how it's viewed. I discovered that rotating the longitude perspective by 90 degrees allowed the main landmasses to all appear on the map without wrapping around. And I flipped it because I liked how it looked better that way, so FT will tell you that the top of the map has negative latitude numbers, with positive ones on the bottom half, but since that's not displayed, it's easy enough for me to mentally adjust.)

There are more images of Lumadair in my galleries if you want to see the terrain and symbols in other formats.

Here is Lumadair so far in Birdseye Continental. Haven't drawn most of the forests yet, nor water depths. I want to redo all of the mountain ridges and ripples to make them fit together a little better, and also be slightly less linear, even though they should still more or less be going in the same direction.

Here are the mountains in northeast corner up close. I tried to use varicolor green ridges to show lower mountains covered with trees, but I'm not sure how well that worked. I might experiment with adding a chameleon or drawn hill beneath them to give them more height. The snowy part is for a mountain that is so high that it is perpetually snow-covered. I think it's the third highest on my campaign world? I think the highest is about 30,000 feet and this one is around 25,000 feet. But I think I want to adjust the snow terrain to be a little tighter to the snowcapped ridges. Thoughts?

I do like how the swamp turned out. The main rivers have a default width of 3, but I added more branches with widths of 2 and 1. (This swamp map also shows an experimentation of putting a ridge on a chameleon hill.)

Reduced the Lightness Base from 75 to 58 for the HILL sheet and 62 for the HILL 2 sheet (but I'm not sure that a 4 point difference is visibly apparent to the human eye), and added some more dunes.

Reversed my plan for the Mansion -- originally, the main entrance was going to be on the southern side, but things seemed to fit better with the main entrance on the other side. For the servant's areas are mostly a level below, with a small area here where they can serve the dining room. I couldn't find wooden stairs suitable for this style that went both up and down, or that could be stacked (Mike Schley's style didn't fit and the other wooden ones couldn't be stacked because they had landings drawn in), so I went with stone stairs for the servants. Used some of Shessar's lovely fireplaces, and some ghosts waltzing in the ballroom from Dundjinni Archives. (They might be a little big -- the ballroom is 30 feet wide.) Shadows didn't make sense for the ghosts, but I wasn't sure if it conveyed that they were floating, so I added some glows from DD3. Still need to add more furnishings, and then on to the upper and lower floors.

Okay, here are the changes I made:

1. Added patches to the murkiness to break it up.
2. Added more bones on the right side and a pile of plundered treasure on the left. (Still not a lot of debris, though.)
3. Adding/increasing a Glow on the walls wasn't putting the tentacle corridors in a shadow like I wanted -- to get the shadow strong enough, it caused the contents in the sucker rooms to be too obscured. So I did add a shadow over the interior rooms and corridors after all.
4. Changed the Glow settings on the solid rock area of the cavern, so that the edges don't look so sharp. (I will also post the FCW in case anyone wants to recommend adjusting the settings.)
5. Moved all of the "above" rocks and weeds to a special layer that can be hidden or shown.
6. Added an entire layer of rocks to that new layer of varying sizes (up to 5x or 6x, I believe). I used the "symbols in area" function to scatter weedy rocks around, and then filled in.
7. Added a wall mask so that the constructed walls no longer cast a shadow on the excavated cave walls. Midway through, I realized that I could simplify my painstaking efforts by copying my constructed walls to another wall sheet above the mask, this one with no effects. The walls below the mask cast the shadows and glow; the wall above the mask has no effects, but allowed me to be a little sloppy in drawing the walls mask. (At the very end, I realized I could have simplified it even further by copying the cave walls to the Walls Mask sheet.)

Thoughts?

Thoughts?