Teston

[Korash]

this is a random town I am working on using pyrandon's Medieval Town Map tutorial (found here = http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1150). So far I have reached post IV and just finished the river part of that post and it has taken about 3 hours to reach this stage. If this is slow or fast I have no clue as I am a relative noob with the prog. mapping, but I think it is faster than if I started from scratch. I am using Gimp for this so we will see how it turns out in the end .

As always, c & c more than welcome. I have given much advice of late, so turn-about is fair play

I will rate the tut after I am done, but I like it so far

:edit: After posting I realized that the res is real low (72) I really have to stop doing that. Any way in Gimp to set a higher res as default? I NEVER check that setting until after I have invested some time.......

[Ascension]

Lookin good so far.

[Fabrice]

I was only wondering... is there a reason why the city seems to avoid the main river? Excepted in the case of swamps, people would build along a river for the easy access to water as life necessity and as trade route. Moreover the bend in the upper left-hand corner would be ideal as natural fortification.

Or maybe you planned to have the city on a hill overlooking the river and the surrounding flatlands, the better to protect itself? Then the river bends would make perfect sense... Or maybe I should just let you go on with the tutorial and keep my comments for later

Good luck and have fun in your experimentations!

[Korash]

I was only wondering... is there a reason why the city seems to avoid the main river? Excepted in the case of swamps, people would build along a river for the easy access to water as life necessity and as trade route. Moreover the bend in the upper left-hand corner would be ideal as natural fortification.

Or maybe you planned to have the city on a hill overlooking the river and the surrounding flatlands, the better to protect itself? Then the river bends would make perfect sense... Or maybe I should just let you go on with the tutorial and keep my comments for later

Good luck and have fun in your experimentations!

I was thinking along the lines that the town was built on the slopes of a hill/hills that forced the bend in the river. The high point would be on the south west side of town with sharp drops south and west of that, and gentler slopes north and east. Might add a few water falls or cascades on the two small branches starting on that hill, if I ever figure out how to do that.

The more I think of it, the more I think that this town might have arisen from a massive flood that forced people to the high ground, and lasted long enough that permenant structures took root.

Looks based on RPG city gen. I do like the river. It's hand drawn, not generated with layer styles and such i presume?
I'll keep an eye on this one.
Where do you place your batteries?

Spot on Hoel! and yup the river was handpainted then blured and smudged to within an inch of its life Most of the time spent on this map so far was on the river enlarging, editing and painting.

As for the batteries, any good Battery Commander will study the lay of the land before placing his guns. As the the "lay" is as flat as steamroller road-kill atm, I will have to get back to you on that one Hoel. Rest assured that I have thought of arty support somewhere.

[Hoel]

Looks based on RPG city gen. I do like the river. It's hand drawn, not generated with layer styles and such i presume?
I'll keep an eye on this one.
Where do you place your batteries?

[Steel General]

Another one to keep an eye on...

[Hoel]

Excellent. Report back to HQ when you begin fortfying!
Carry on soldier.

[Korash]

okay , spent another couple of hours working on Post IV and V. Added Rocky terrain and Elevation shadows for the illusion of height and placed my light source. Have yet to add the shadows thrown by it, but that will be next I think. I also changed the res to 175, in the hope that it will help.

Besides the shadows I think I need to:

-Work just a bit more on the Heights to make them stand out more

-Redo some of the roads and streams to make them match better with the new terrain

-I also need a way to merge the elevation shadows down into one layer, but that can wait til later. :edit: the prob I have with the merge down right now is that I lose the effect of the previous layer :endedit:

Comments & critiques?

[Ascension]

This is looking great and I'm not just blowin smoke when I say that I'm keepin my eye on this...it rocks so far. As far as the merge...do you have 2 or more shadow layers? If they have different blending modes then those modes can get lost when merging. Personally, I just leave mine alone, but since each layer takes a chunk of memory with it I can see why the need for the merge.

Try this to see if it helps: click on the first shadow layer, create a new layer, link it to that first shadow layer, move the new layer under that first shadow layer, click on the shadow layer then merge down...this will remove layer styles (blending modes and opacity count as layer styles) while preserving the look. Do the same steps for other shadow layers then merge them together.

[Korash]

thanks for the complements It is very encouraging.

As far as the merge...do you have 2 or more shadow layers? If they have different blending modes then those modes can get lost when merging. Personally, I just leave mine alone, but since each layer takes a chunk of memory with it I can see why the need for the merge.

No Kidding, 5 layers filled with black, @ ~10% opac and I am looking at over 120 meg of additional size in working memory demand. Slooooooows thiiiiings doooooown just a tad. Might have something to do with a 2kx2k px picture as well

Try this to see if it helps: click on the first shadow layer, create a new layer, link it to that first shadow layer, move the new layer under that first shadow layer, click on the shadow layer then merge down...this will remove layer styles (blending modes and opacity count as layer styles) while preserving the look. Do the same steps for other shadow layers then merge them together.

I don't have time to try this atm, but I will later if I can figure out how to "link" layers. Not too sure I want to merge before I am satisfied with the elevation shadows, which I am not yet.