Serain, Capital of the Kingdom of Vabur

[Eld]

Hello everyone!
Since my last visit in spring 2015 I've come up with another project: city maps.
As my fantasy-world-project develops well in many different kinds of areas and topics, I only find little time for mapping every few weeks. So it took a while to show something.

Today I want to show you the map of the city of Serain. It's a test project to get used to my newly developed style and technique.
Serain is the capital city of the Kingdom of Vabur which lies climatically at the height of southern France or Northern Italy. In the city live about 108,000 people and the walled area is roughly 3.5km² large. On the northern bank of the river Boldogop lies the king's castle. The map is fully made with Gimp.

Serain 3167 WIP5.jpg

As the style is not fully developed yet, I appreciate comments, suggestions, observations and criticism on this topic very much!
At the moment my biggest problem is that I want to color some areas in a different color to show vacant places such as gardens, parks etc. However, if I select such an area and refill it with the new color, the formerly slightly blurred borders of the area get sharply outlined. That leads to a very pixelated impression I couldn't get rid of yet. If anyone knows an easy way to avoid this, I'd be glad to hear about it.

[Falconius]

It could be anti-aliasing problems causing that. Either with the selection method used or with the fill threshold? It has been causing me headaches with my rivers in the same manner as you describe.

[Josiah VE]

That is one very tightly packed city...

[Eld]

@Falconius
I selected the area with the magic wand (is that it? not sure about the English vocabulary) and filled it with the fill bucket tool. I tried several modes for the filling tool but had no success, even with the mode called "smooth edges". I'll work on this later on.

@Josiah VE, you're totally right. It was a first test to see where I'm heading to. One of the results is that it needs much more open space. Therefor I wanted to change the color of some areas to define gardens and parks. Also some more market squares will be added and some streets will get broader.

[Falconius]

When you use the select function in GIMP they all have an Anti-aliasing checkbox at the top of the tool options, this is set by default to ON. For me on all the select tools this is located as the very first checkbox. The purpose of it is to sort of feather the edges and avoid the look of pixels you get on an edge of an object. So in effect what it does is blur and pixeliate things at the edge so it's not a hard edge. In other words you want to click that check box off and actually avoid things that say "smooth edges".

[Eld]

Here's an update.
Obviously I found my way around the pixelated edges and colored buildings of importance and parks.
Next steps will be to come up with the areas outside the city walls and with the numbering of all the places that will get their place in the legend. Also the title will need some improvement.

Serain 3167 WIP7.jpg

[Josiah VE]

What I suggest is instead of making roads through a block of houses (that's kinda what it looks like) is to make roads and then make houses.. So then all the houses aren't perfectly conformed to the path and they actually look like houses.

[Eld]

Josiah VE, of course that's the way to go if I want to depict every single house in its own right.
Alas my time and skills are limited and I have plenty of cities to map ahead (I plan to map every important, interesting and capital city of my fantasy project which sums up to 50-100 cities). Therefor I decided not to depict every single building but instead show the city as an build-up area with streets and open place cutting through. So I want to define the shape by the negative place. In addition to that I think the scale of 2px for 1 metre does not really support depicting houses in a neat roof-style as for example in the Haerlech project by J.Edward. The black areas and blocks are meant to be read as build-up areas with several houses, backyards and stuff. If that's not obvious, I failed on that and you may have some suggestions on how to fix that in order to get the right impression?

[Josiah VE]

Now that you explain them as like a city block, it makes more sense. What I would do is use a dynamic brush on photoshop to just draw houses in, it's very quick and looks pretty good. I've heard you can do it on GIMP as well. However if you're doing that many cities (and that is A LOT of cities) this way is fine!

A tutorial on Fantastic Maps (but it's for photoshop, I'm not exactly sure how to do it in GIMP):

http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2013/03...namic-brushes/

[Falconius]

Or if you wanted a more individuated look you can follow the streets with a blocky type brush set to erase and jitter it would break up the smooth edges and cause it to look like its the edge of the block of buildings rather than the edge of the plots. In any case I think that looks pretty good in that style anyway, and it works for many people, like that Altdorf Warhammer map further down the forum. What are the very tiny round dots? Lamp posts? Columns? Bollards?