This is going to be a map of the largest and most significant city in my fictional world of Askath (which I've posted continent maps of elsewhere on these forums). In fact, the City of Anhrush is where this world began (at least, where I started creating it, way back in 2002). The basic premise of the city is that it is built around a large spring on the edge of a desert; some of the city's earliest inhabitants dug a networks of canals and reservoirs to both store drinking water and contain the spring's periodic floods. I've written a great deal more history for the city and the republic that sprang from it, but that's best saved for another time.

My current efforts to map the city are not my first; I made this first map of it with FreeHand (a program which a few of you might remember from before Adobe bought and killed it to promote Illustrator) long ago. In the years since I made that map, my understanding of history and urban geography has improved enough to let me tackle a new, redesigned version of the city. The new map will retain the function-based coloring of buildings from the old map, but is based on the terrain data I created for my map of Zasháve, with fractal detail added in Terragen.

With all that introductory material out of the way, here's the first WIP:

wip03Artboard 1@2x-80.jpg

I'm using Illustrator for now, but I'm considering switching to CC3+/City Designer sooner or later. Just how challenging that will be is still unknown to me; those of you who have worked with CD3 doubtless have a better handle on the work involved in such things as making custom symbols and importing a background for tracing. Any advice on where I should start, as a beginner in CD3 (or if I should even go that route) would be most helpful, but I'd appreciate any C&C anyone has.