Glad the shaded relief concept has helped - and very nicely executed too!

In case you haven't seen it, there is this Annual issue that deals specifically with watercolour-look map designs using CC3+ too. You may also get more ideas on this theme by searching through posts on the Forum by Lillhans, who was for some time our resident expert on creating this type of drawing style.

Happy I could help a little!

For a "proper" Sumerian settlement though, you need some canals passing through it, and maybe a bit less city planning 😉!

You could also have the canals running directly through the city (or connecting inside it in a variety of ways). Keeps the water flowing through, so it stays fresher, basically. From Sumerian archaeology (albeit very little's been done on this aspect), harbours in the cities could well have been placed a bit like market places - wherever there was convenient space and a couple of canals (or more) met, say. Water transport was just so vital for bulky, heavy or large cargoes there (e.g. nearly all timber had to be imported), it's arguable their canals and waterways were more important than the roads. Rulers seemed always to comment on having improved, or "built" (usually meaning something nearer "rebuilt" or "repaired" in many cases, given how many different rulers claimed to have "built" the same thing over time), with rather less emphasis on roadworks, beyond making them safe for travel (i.e. keeping the bandits away). That's probably too historically/archaeologically "real" for this setting, however 😁!

To my eye, the pockmarks are too regular in the image to work as weathering. Plus you may find that at different image resolutions, they don't always look the same anyway.

If you want the ziggurat to look more weathered, I'd suggest using fewer neatly-straight lines. Try drawing them instead with a new tool using a low-level fractal polygon, at least in places, and you might want to show some areas of greater damage if the structure has been standing for hundreds to a few thousand years (take a look at the Egyptian pyramids for ideas, for example, and, given the grey colouring, it may be worth looking at some of the more worn examples of diorite statues from the same region for ideas of how they look too). If it's been repaired in places, that might be an excuse to some some subtly different grey stonework over a few "stone/brick" equivalent areas.

Just a thought, but if there are four main staircases, shouldn't they each have a road/track leading to them (even if those are old, worn and hard to make out completely)?

The dunes aren't really working to me, because while everything else is seen top-down, they're viewed side-on. I'd be more inclined to experiment with some terrain drawing tools and textures instead, including trying some of the various darkness Solid bitmap fill options with a suitable bevel or lighted bevel effect to make them look sufficiently hilly and dune-like.

I've found the fractal settings can take a lot of playing around with to get right; commonly now, I either just go with the default drawing tool settings, or simply use the straight polygon options instead. Every now and again, there'll be a glut of problematic lines show up, simply because the fractal tool has added too many nodes in too small a space (possibly because I've needed to set two "click" points too near one another to get the shape right).

What you can do is just draw a straight guideline you need the fractal bumps to be behind first, and then as each new stretch of line comes up, if it looks wrong, just hit the spacebar key to try another fractal option for that part. (And keep hitting the spacebar, only to wish there was an "undo" option to go back to the one you've just spacebarred past, in my case...😏)

A little further on now, and the cave's starting to look a bit more lived-in:

Getting the effects to look right for the two raised rock platforms in the southern front cave took quite a while, and may need further tweaking. I also tried adding some texturing patches to the cave floors in places, but they started to feel a little too much for the drawing, so were removed after a while. Might have a rethink on those later, perhaps.

I was happier with how the hex-room walls worked out, again after quite a bit of trial and error. Being the basal level here, they're attached directly to the cave floor, and I did add - and left there still - some texture patches inside those rooms. All I did beyond that was move them to a new sheet with some suitable effects, broaden the lines a little and change their colouring. And then cut some narrow doorways using the :CC2BREAK: command. Working on the principle the humanoid bee-folk are slim and not too tall, so they don't really need large doorways!

Upper levels to start after this. More when it's done!

For the upper hex-room cave levels, I hand-sketched some ideas using a mix of graph and tracing paper to make sure I had the general sizes and layouts correct. Then, I redrew those into the CC3+ map, using the same TEMP Sheet and Layer as for the base hex-room layouts earlier. I decided not to scan-in and insert the hand-drawings this time, as I knew things would need adjusting in-map to fit with what was already drawn there.

After that, a great deal of tweaking, changing and moving about followed, to improve the look and layout of the whole. Indeed, this took so long, I didn't have time to start converting the drawn lines to parts of the map, although I did identify one new item, which was the need to indicate a specific hex-room in all the "northern" hex-room cave layouts, to help with orientation (the one larger hex-room on all the "southern" layouts solves that problem there already).

Oh, and I changed all the layout lines to white!

Layout of the upper levels, and what each of these levels will look like, are of course subject to change once converting them to the appearance of the rest of the map begins, and the red-wall room isn't definitely how it will be in the end either. The external exits from some of the higher levels were suggested as existing by the Inkwell Ideas book for these designs, incidentally.

While these were all essential tasks, hopefully, there'll be some "real" mapping progress to report by next time!

Didn't get quite as much done as I'd hoped before reporting back here (though that's often the case), as sometimes tweaking the effects or making subtle colour changes just needs more time that you can easily predict. However, a bit further forward:

The basic cave outlines were swiftly converted from their previous white outlines by simply using the "Change like draw tool" option under the right-click list of the :CC2MCHANGE: button, although the floors had to be moved to their correct sheet for the effects to work after that too. I also added a "Solid 30 Bitmap" fill over these new floors (by simply copying the existing floors to a new sheet, and changing the properties of the floor piece so-created), to try to give an impression that the floors aren't attached to the hex-rooms on these upper levels. Note that two of the exterior exit upper levels in the lower right corner haven't had their new fills added yet, because they have to be drawn in freshly, as the tunnel floors are really floors at the new level, with a ledge where they begin. That's all still to sort out.

The hex-room walls were simply converted to their thicker, coloured versions by changing properties of the original white versions. I've also changed the "identified" room colour in the upper cavern to be less jarring, though I think now this may be too subtle! Suitable floors, hopefully looking enough like the cells in a beehive, were added by again copying the hex-walls to another new sheet and amending their properties accordingly. I also added an Inner Glow effect to this sheet to alter the look of the floors a little more. I've not added doorways (which may include floor hatches - haven't finally decided) to the upper levels yet, as I wanted the basic room shapes to be completed first. Cutting the walls beforehand would have made this problematic.

Possibly one of the more important, yet least discussed, skills with CC3+ drawing creation is understanding what things can be repurposed beyond what their titles alone may indicate. Textures like this are just one element, as symbols can be reworked/rescaled to look like something completely different too. And then tweaking items using the effects as well. Remembering, or finding, the key thing when you need it is, of course, quite another matter!

Me too!😁

Forgot to mention last time that I'd deleted and created a new beyond-map mask on the SCREEN sheet after laying-down the final terrain segments, using the same typed commands as mentioned back in the mists of time in this topic (end of the May 8th notes for the Bee Caverns map 😊). I do this for almost all CC3+ mapping, as I generally extend such areas well beyond the map border, to ensure any effects on their sheets won't create an unwanted edge-of-the-world outline look inside the map's frame. Similarly, any drawing tools I'm using that will run beyond the border need to have their "Restrict to map border" box unchecked, and then the tool saved so it'll remember I've done that. Thus for the River, Current Width tool:

Which of course is a not-so-subtle clue that things have progressed to drawing in some rivers now!

The next stage of the process began by sketching the base line for the road through the Pass, and the rough river lines, all hand traced from my inserted bitmap image design. All of these are going to be changed as the mapping proceeds, as they now have to fit the new terrain that's already there, so the lines are very approximate to begin with. More minor river lines will be added, others removed, for instance, as well as some new trails added. Plus to get the river and road lines right, the various randomly-located map features also need to be emplaced, as they'll help identify where such things need to be.

While the random allocation of features to squares is fine for the planning stage, they have to be moved around to suit the look of the map now. If two (or more) things are in adjacent squares, I might keep them separate, or combine them at one place, depending on exactly what they are, for instance. Some creatures or monsters have preferred habitats, such as woodlands or marshes, so that provides an opportunity to add some smaller patches of woods, aside from those the base map had already indicated in the lower left corner. Consequently, this part of the process can be quite complex, fairly slow, yet also fascinating, as there's a lot to think about, and try to be creative with.

Hence the limited amount of new features added or changed so far in this image (all the texturing options have been turned off for now):

As this shows too, labels need adding (mostly so I don't lose track of what each thing is meant to be). Red are creatures or monsters (in the RPG sense), green is vegetation, brown are occupied Dwarf settlements, grey unoccupied or ruined places, and blue unusual water features. The accompanying notes will clarify this in the final Atlas version, though I may add a map legend as well. The limited range of symbols has meant all have been repurposed so far beyond what their "official" titles suggest - those very popular circles are listed as "Hamlet", for example. Luckily, all have varicolor options, so identifying what's what becomes fully practical.

My original intention was to use the Gaeilge 1 font for the labels again, as with the Bee Caverns map. However, I couldn't get that to look sufficiently legible at reduced size, so have switched to the good old standby of boldfaced Arial for now. Place names were selected from a pre-rolled list of random options constructed from the name-tables in North Wind Adventures' "Hyperborea" RPG, adjusted or added-to in places, as those tables generate what are meant as personal names, based on a number of different Earthly cultures (although I ignored those tables for the more recognisable Greek, Latin and Old English/Anglo-Saxon ones in this case).

As usual, all that's been done till now remains subject to change, including the exact locations of the various features - aside from those sketchy, unadjusted river lines away from the area developed so far. I'm not happy with the look of that patch of Cedar Woods forest either. I've heavily adjusted the effects on the FOREST sheet already, and ran out of time to do more. I'm thinking currently to add a new sheet to outline the woodland area, so I can make the inner part, still on the FOREST sheet, transparent enough to show the contour lines for the rising mountains. There is a Transparency effect on that sheet now. Unfortunately, Transparency's something of an odd effect, which tends to interact poorly with glows on the same sheet (which is what's presently outlining the wood), so it's no longer properly see-through. I've had to set the Transparency to 90% opacity just to stop the glow from doing all sorts of unwanted things to the whole polygon to get this appearance. Then again, even if the opacity is set to 100%, objects on a sheet with only Transparency active look more washed-out, and sometimes slightly transparent still, than if the effect is turned off entirely.

Still, a typical level of progress so far!