Sagitarii - practice city map

[Caenwyr]

I'm glad you're back at this.
This looks as awesome as ever!
About the light, do you think anyone will notice? I know I sure wouldn't... I still don't fully understand what you mean.
Anyhow, looks great!

Hey Josiah, thanks for your enthousiasm! I'm a big perfectionist when it comes to these things, and basically, on a map with north being up, sunlight should never come from the top when depicting the northern hemisphere north of the Tropic of Cancer, simply because that part of the world never sees the sun in the north. So if I want this place to be in the northern hemisphere and want the sunlight to come from a realistic angle, I either have to reshade everything or rotate the map.

Now what I could do is swap the blending modes of the hand-drawn on-object shadows so the light seems to come from the south west - which is a perfectly possible angle. The same isn't possible for the hand-drawn drop shadows however - but at this stage these have been generated mostly automatically, with no major adaptations to them at this point. So I could just change the angle of the light in settings and be done with it.

However, if I want to use this map for the city of Faltorn in my novel (you can find that city on the eastern shore of the Dragon's Tail in this map) as I stated a while back, I will have to rotate it 90° clockwise anyway, since the river in Faltorn flows south to north, not east to west. As a big plus, rotating the map would work out perfectly with regards to the sun angle as well: light would then come from the South East, which is just as plausible as the former correction scenario.

I was wondering, have you tried to dump the coastline layer ?

I haven't, but I might experiment with that idea for a bit. Would make it look mare natural maybe. I'm not sure if the transition from water to land is that clean though: if I remember correctly I used the coastline layer to select the water area. I tried to be as careful as possible, because I know bad things can happen when you use a line with a certain thickness to delineate areas on both sides of it, but I can't guarantee there won't be at least a few selection artefacts hidden under that line. Each no bigger than a few pixels, but together they might spell visual disaster. Or they might not. I'll have to check out!

If it turns out too messy, I can still tune down the opacity of the coastline layer a bit, or render it a brownish grey instead of that harsh black. Possibilities possibilities!