Safeton city map CD3

[jtougas]

Awesome. looks just like I "remember" it.. Great job!!

[nematode]

Thanks for the kudos guys!

Bravo. I congratulate you on a fine job.

You could probably do a little more to blend the imported elements into your PS scene, but that is really just nit-picking. Well done.

Hi Aval, first of all thanks, and second, would you be willing to tell me what you are seeing and suggest what I might do to improve things?

[Katto]

That looks very good so far. Nice combination of CD3 and PS. I think Aval means the color and filter of the sea I would add a bit of stroke to the landscape and the houses. I can imagine the pseudo handdrawn stroke described in Ascension's house tutorial would fit good.

[Aval Penworth]

That looks very good so far. Nice combination of CD3 and PS. I think Aval means the color and filter of the sea I would add a bit of stroke to the landscape and the houses. I can imagine the pseudo handdrawn stroke described in Ascension's house tutorial would fit good.

Indeed Katto sees where I am coming from. Look at the colour saturation and try to make it consistant. Your houses are soft and subtle where the piers, sea and boats are a bit more saturated. Also one of the piers seems to have a bright bevel highlight, but the rest of the buildings don't. The way the sea filter moulds around the boats and pier isn't quite right.

If you have the CD3 buildings on their own layer you could try a 1 px brownish stroke. If it is too much make a duplicate layer, add the stroke and turn down the opacity.

Again they are just little things.

[nematode]

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

Following up on the advice, I've made some changes, and they're in the attachment.

Katto I'm glad you brought my attention to the water. I've replaced the earlier version with a water layer derived from a satellite photo. The whitecaps are faint but noticeable. It's a sandwich with a brown gradient to depict shallows, which is also faint but noticeable.

I think if I were really into it, I might pursue a technique to accentuate the whitecaps from the photo, and add a small amount of breaking surf-type ripples. But I'm not; maybe next time.

My earlier water had been produced with the stock ocean ripple filter in PSE and I had to wrestle with it a lot to get a decent result. The main issue was that I needed to give the filter a gradient-like variation in color for it to produce ripples that were appealing and somewhat to scale, so the best I was able to produce with the filter was a compromise. And of all the elements in the picture, the ocean ripple-filter-created-water survived the transition from original to small sized bitmap least successfully. So I am not sad to move on from that filter.

Since I produce the bitmap from CD3 rather than PSE (since CD3 has directional wall shadows) the great majority of the structures never see PSE. So I can't add a stroke to the buildings, but I can output from CD3 with some glow on the structures to approximate that effect, and the result of that is in the attachment.

I repaired the bevelled pier, and removed a layer of gloss from under the ships that I had added to simulate ripples against the hull. After due consideration I can't think of something to further equalize variations in color between structures generated in CD3 and bitmaps that I brought in from other sources. I'm OK with that, all things considered.

Finally, add captioning, a compass, etc, and I think that'll be a wrap.

[Aval Penworth]

Excellent. A great map made even better. I am sure DMs around the world will be snaffling it for their games.

[jtougas]

Awesome THAT's going in my WoG collection. (with appropriate credit of course.. )

[Katto]

Much better now. Well done!

[nematode]

Here's the final version!

This project has been a great learning exercise. A year and a half ago, I didn't know how to do a whole lot more than open a new file and draw my name in pencil.

Thanks to everyone who commented as well as all the people who created tutorials for this website and contributed art to the Mapping Elements forum, all of which has been tremendously helpful.

[jtougas]

Awesome..!!