WIP : Town of Fière-Muraille

[Larb]

OMG that swatch-based colour wheel is such a great idea.

[Narolas]

Hm. I see what you mean, I'll look into it. It could be compression, or it could just be that I hastily drew a line and my image's resolution isn't high enough to compensate the pixely result.
If anything i'll go around and re-draw some of the ugliest lines, now that you point them out they annoy me

I already know that for the paths and roads, it's photoshop's fault since i'm using the border effect on a layer, and that has a tendency to make very jagged borders, that's easily fixed so i'll work on that next time.

[Sarithus]

Hm. I see what you mean, I'll look into it. It could be compression, or it could just be that I hastily drew a line and my image's resolution isn't high enough to compensate the pixely result.
If anything i'll go around and re-draw some of the ugliest lines, now that you point them out they annoy me

By the looks of the image showing your PS document you have some effects on the layers. Probably not, but one thing that could be causing that is if you've got a stroke effect over the brushes lines.

[snodsy]

Thanks Narolas for the Brush link, I'll have to give it a try. I'm always amazed how open you guys are to share your tricks, it's really inspiring and so helpful. Thanks and great job on this map

[Chashio]

You'll be hard pressed to get very smooth lines with this much wonderful detail squeezed into such a low-resolution document. If you can, next time start with a bigger canvas and increase your brush size... and do most of the drawing at 50% zoom. But, really, pixelly lines aside, this is a fabulous map. You really are fitting a ton of fine details into this, right down to those lovely cobblestones. And the colors are nice too.

[Narolas]

Yea, I realized halfway through the making of this map that my resolution was a bit too small, unfortunately photoshop slows down a lot when files get over 3-4 Go, so making a huge map is a challenge.

But hey, it's my first time making a map of this type, and my second time making a map of any kind on photoshop, so i'm still learning !

[snodsy]

Don't tell us it's only your second time doing a map in photoshop, that's depressing.

I've had the same problem with resolution vs speed. I did find a nice article on speeding up Photoshop, it did help the redraw and stopped the lag time with the drawing tablet. My map is 2GB with about 40 layers so it was bogging down pretty bad. Here is the link for CS5/CS6. http://www.adobe.com/inspire/2012/04...rformance.html

[Narolas]

WIP_17.jpg

Look at those farms and fields !
I'm very happy with the result on those, it can be very subtle and some of it feels like a ton of intricate effort (lots of layers, with effects, and tiny little touches) for something not necessarily seen, but I kinda love how it turned out.

Next and final step, map border, scale, labelling and legend.
This might actually take quite a while, not graphically, but because I have to go back to do some brainstorming and writing to come up with names for these vague places, and make it all fit into some coherent theme and feel of the region as well as narratively (using existing names of places and people, inventing famous names/people, etc..)

In any case i'll put the final result in a new thread in the "finished" board, and probably a link on this thread or something.

Even though it's not completely done, it kinda is on a purely visual basis (if you don't count the pretty border), so ... Thanks a ton everyone, I enjoyed and benefited a lot from all the feedback and encouragement, it's especially nice to receive critique and sometimes praise from some "big names" whose work i'm in awe of


Phew, that project was much, much longer than expected, but very fun and rewarding! I kinda got to completely and entirely imagine the region and town of Fière-muraille as I spent so much time thinking about it, it'll surely help when i'm DM-ing it because i've now got a crystal clear picture of it.

PS: of course i'm sure some things can be fixed/tweaked, and I probably will do that as I come back to it later, notice something wrong.. so feel free to say/point out anything, but at this point it's polishing and doesn't really take any effort, so i'm kinda considering it "done graphically".

[Abu Lafia]

Man, these fields look great indeed! Congratulations for finishing the "map" part. Looking forward to see this beautiful piece in the "Finished Map Section" soon. Keep up the good work!

[Larb]

I've enjoyed watching this map develop. I look forward to the posted finished and labled map. A little lore in your finished post would be welcome too so we can learn a bit about the city.