WIP: Kobenhag, Capital of the Civilized Orc Empire

[su_liam]

I've been tasked to come up with a stunner map. I don't know if I can manage,"stunner," but I have been intending to make a city map in a world I created much earlier.

Burphaban was a world, or rather a continent, that I started way back in 2009. I have a couple of city or town maps I've been wanting to do. I did a wood block on carpet model of the small frontier towns of Seberang and Desa Hutan in the north, and I had a very primitive sketch for Kobenhag, the capital of what would later be an empire of civilized orcs.

Today, I will start work on Kobenhag.

Let's start with a couple of very basic establishing maps in QGIS. The final image shows my sketch.

This is a work in progress, so I will show my progress as I make it.

[su_liam]

As part of my initial housekeeping on this project, I decided to roughly apply my sketch to the establishing map. Just to get an idea of where things are. That's the first attachment.
Establishing_View_Plan.png
Looking at the size of the region, I got a bit,… concerned, about the scale. to get more of a sense of the size of the place, I decided to do a really quick and dirty overlay of the approximate peninsula on a familiar Real World place. Thus I did a little measuring and sketching on Google Earth(no need to import RW data for such a simple thing). That is the second attachment.
San-Francisco_COMP.png

It's a pretty big patch of land for mediaeval-esque city, but the areas like Hillside, Palace Hill, Harborside and Longknives might not necessarily need to be altogether contiguous. Hillside is going to be a collection of palatial manors with plenty of open space, Palace Hill and Harborside could well have their own walled areas, Longknives is an out and out slum(from hell), and Quarry Hill is a resource extraction area(not even necessarily part of the city. I may choose to condense things a bit as work goes on, but it's looking, reasonably, workable as-is. I can play with the shape of the peninsula, as the landforms really are at the resolution limits of my existing data.

I will be needing to resample and add details to the existing elevation data. I'm thinking of adding resolution in stages. Perhaps starting with a higher resolution model of the entire Steincastel Island. Then zooming in to a smaller, still more detailed area connecting Kobenhag to the 'nearby' mountains. After that I'll definitely do the immediate environs of Kobenhag in even higher resolution.

My intention(which has been reinforced by viewing the area overlaid on San Francisco) is to make the Kobenhag Peninsula quite hilly, with at least one high ridge separating Harborside and Longknives from the Hillside villas.

[Ilanthar]

Is that a napkin ? It looks like a very interesting concept to me.

[su_liam]

It's actually an old receipt.

I'm happy with the concept. I'm still very much on the wall about the scale.
If I use the major part of the peninsula, it's gonna be a hella big city. If I condense things down toward the tip… I think it's gonna get kind of… fat(?). I don't know, the concept in my mind wants ocean on both sides, but I also want the swanky villas to be pretty close to the the blood slums, separated only by a a high ridge.

I would like to keep the shorelines as-is, if only for the challenge, but if necessary, I guess I could narrow the peninsula some. I'm still at the, turning things over in my head stage.

I did the on map sketch in Inkscape, on an exported QGIS map. I think I need to bite the bullet and redo the sketch on a fresh shapefile in QGIS so I can easily measure things and also have them available as templates. Sketch in the urban areas, but also greenspaces, ridgelines and the like. It'll help me down the line I think.

[su_liam]

Starting to upsample the elevation model. I've zoomed in on Steincastel Island using the Simple Resample tool in Wilbur. Resampled the box from 40ºS to 70ºS and 101ºW to 61ºW to 3072 x 2304 resolution. I've cleaned up the shoreline of the island and added some topography in the corner around Kobenhag. Not sure how much I want to pretty this up before upsampling the area immediately around Kobenhag. Probably not too much. I don't want this to be a life's work. I have too many of those floating around unfinished…

The attached image is a reduction of the texture in Wilbur.

[su_liam]

Map style is a long way down in my workflow. I need to have a terrain to map before I get down to style. But… Yeah. But, I figured I'd put up some early ideas. If I can manage it, and it works on a city as mammoth as Kobenhag is looking to be, I'd love to make something like snodsy's Four Girls maps. Second choice is this London map, should clearly work for a huge city, but my skills are… eh.
london1.jpg

london2.jpg
Another beauty, that probably won't translate well to such a big city is this map in the Space Opera Operation Peregrine module by Stefan Jones or Steven S.Crompton. cizunotchee.jpg.

[su_liam]

Ugh! I'm such a twit!!!

So I had the bright idea of drilling down, resampling smaller areas of the elevation model and adding detail till I have a very detailed model of the terrain underlying Kobenhag. Oooh! I'm so smart!

So I upsample Steincastel Island and the immediate environs. So far so good.
Steincastel_Detailed_SMALL.png

Then I up sampled the immediate area around Kobenhag. Not too bad. The details could be better, but I'm beginning to come around to the idea that terrain needs to be compounded from real world DEMs.
Kobenhag_EnvironsMAP_SMALL.png

Finally, I upsampled the area "right around Kobenhag." If you're wondering about the quote, a picture is worth a thousand obscenities.
Boner!_SMALL.png

Oh, bloody BUH-rilliant! Or should I say, "DUH?" I completely missed Kobenhag.

I have two choices at this point. I can go back and detail the actual site I had chosen for Kobenhag. Both options have advantages and disadvantages. The relatively small size of the peninsula I detailed might be a better fit for the kind of city I want to build. I will have to edit my cities shapefile, but that shouldn't be too hard. Previous maps of Burphaban were in small enough scale that the difference in position shouldn't be too obvious… Actually, I'm not sure there's a disadvantage to that!

I will have to rework the sketch a bit, but I need to get that into QGIS anyway.

Looks like Kobenhag is moving about 30 klicks northwest.

It's still embarassing…

[Larb]

I am watching this thread with interest it is just that it is an approach I am completely unfamiliar with so I'm not sure what to add!

[J.Edward]

Yep, I would say the same thing su_liam.
I wanted to say something useful or encouraging earlier today but didn't really know what to say there.
But I am watching your progress with interest.

[su_liam]

I've decided to relocate Kobenhag to the new location. It's a bit smaller than the peninsula where Kobenhag was formerly located. That's just as well. Looking at the profusion of often large buildings in a similar area of San Francisco convinces me that a smaller area is not a bad thing. I may even choose to let the quarters of Kobenhag spread out a bit more down the peninsula.
Kobenhag_Layout_SMALL.png
That DEM covers an area of about 3 arcminutes on a side with a resolution of 2048 pixels squared. If the planet Burperos is the same size as Earth, that's about 2.7 meters or 9 feet across a pixel. That may even be excessive resolution!

I situated the associated naval harbour, Warspite Bay, in the crotch of the next peninsula to the west.
Kobenhag_NavalPortSMALL.png
The overland route from Palace Hill to Warspite Bay is just over 7 miles.

Not perfect, but I think I have a good basis to build a city on. The scale looks like I should be able to show at least major buildings. May be better for a Cizunotchee-style map than the London-style.

That's about it for the day. Now on to the hard part.