Buried City Project

[shantedracule]

Just getting this started; The next part of my current campaign Has my players going into a long buried ancient city. This will be my first attempt at creating an interior map from scratch. This may take me a vary long time and will be done in sections. The following is a few assumptions that will be used in creating the maps.

• City was advanced civilization of unknown origin (simulated by using modern construction ideas)
• Buildings are old; damaged from years of being buried; but otherwise fairly stable.
• There will be alot of up and down travel on map as ceilings cave in and floors are blocked in some areas.
• Sparse population of area (plan on two factions)
• Despight the lack of combat encounters or other battle necisitating features maps will need to be used to show the area for flavor.
• Maps will be scratch built (with some items being brought in from other free sources) in gimp
• Maps will be used with and built for the Map tool From RPG Tools

As the area is underground and not lit lighting effects will be a secondary. I plan on doing the base map as a clean rendition as ruined furniture and detritus will be brought in as objects on the VTT system. Though important area effects will still be layed out.

The following is a rendition of the old city map found by one of our intrepid adventurers. This was made when the city was still above ground and thriving so does not have the layouts for cave ins and damages. Also this was a fast general city design.


More to follow Soon.......

[Gidde]

I like the layout, feels very organic.

[jtougas]

Very cool. This will be fun to watch develop

[shantedracule]

Ok realize this is yet to do a true interior but here is a few more steps.

The First was a simple Outline done in gimp to break things up a bit and show major collapses.

Old CountryUG.png

This is the same map With labels and graphics for factions
Old CountryUGlbl.png

Placing this just for the Documentation the work is still ongoing.

[shantedracule]

Oh as an aside this is all beneath a city map I did Here

[shantedracule]

I no this is still not a structure or area map please bare with me

Step 1 was to take our working area and blow it up to extrapolate as much detail as possible:
Work Area Blown Up.png

I then made a second layer; filled with a stone texture; and then masked it using the blown up area as a guide. This was then further modified by doing a distortion map procedure (Create another layer filled with layer clouds all numbers maxed. Edit layer mask: filter>map>Distort; the first one was -20/20 both with the noise selected; the second reversed with noise selected; the third was 20/-20 the negative was distorted using the rocky texture; and finally a fourth -20/20 again negative with rocky positive with noise).
Rock .png

Ok now to make buildings and roads we will first make the rocky layer invisible; then using our work blwnup and the color select tool we select a region of road; this will give us a not so nice outline for the roads (which works great for buried ruins) Then we make a simple blk/wht layer with the roads as black and set this off to the side for a bit.
Road Building.png

Next we take and choose a texture for the city blocks; I choose one that looked like allot of little fires or swirls (Named chocolate swirls in gimp. We want to ad a mask to this and coppy our roads build layer we just made to the mask, this will make all areas that are roads transparent. We apply this layer mask and then using Filters>Distort> Mosaic we make a nice broken block I chose fairly small octagons and squares blocks with a bit bigger spacing made them messy and color variance down to nothing. Also took all checks except average color out. I also created a layer under it and gave it a marble texture for the roads This is what we have
Blocked Out.jpg

Starting to look a bit like what I want I decided to give my rock texture by taking the random noise we made earlier and aplying the exact same mask from the rock layer then setting it to an overlay
Textured1.jpg

[shantedracule]

The last thing I did tonight was a bit of color correction to make it a bit darker

Color Corected1.jpg

[shantedracule]

Please note just looked at every thing and the Right side of the map should be a large road structure and not a cave in this will get fixed in later renditions.

[shantedracule]

I apologize For not posting recently on this still working on it; I have been experimenting with some Techniques recently dealing with perspective and shadow effects I believe that I have a reasonable idea of how to proceed now and should have something later today to show you guys

[shantedracule]

Ok at this point I have tried several techniques to do the interior structure. Things I have done so far are not coming out the right way. I think I need a jumping point; any got a decent tut on this stuff?

Poored through the tuts section here at the guild saw several good tuts. one I will be playing with is http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...r-take-on-this . it seems to give enough of the basics while being flexible enough for me to tweak to the style I need.