Haven City Map
Im struggling with making the Haven city map in Blue Planet look right, its for the new 3rd edition, we work as a group of fans putting together the 3rd edition and not as paid employees, so its a labour of love, but getting a large city map to look right is causing my tiny brain to fail.
The original was just black blobs on a landscape, then later they did a street layout, I have merged the two together to see if that would help me make it look right but that doesnt seem to have worked either.
My Images and the maps I do are all hobby based, something to keep me occupied as Im too ill to work, and sometimes my disability blocks my ability to see what needs to be done.
Here's where I am atm.
Haven city map.jpgBlue Planet Haven.jpg
The Blue Planet one looks cool - I can imagine that texture as a bunch of rooftops. They just look too random. Even if buildings pile up and overlap, I'd expect to glimpse streets. Maybe you could show snippets of roads beneath the gray , and out into the green more clearly?
I really not happy at all with the image on the right, it was a test to see what it would look like, to many wooded areas, didnt like the way the buildings came out either.
And at a scale of 20k across the map, would you see any of the streets.
"Maglev line" look like someone who played Transport Tycoon a lot
Argh....just lost a long post to you.
Sorry can't be fagged to write it all again, but the short version is:
Ask yourself whether you really do need it textured or whether a more graphic design will do. In which case I'd suggest you might want to try and do it in Vector.
If you want texture, think about using something like 'City Engine' which plugs into Vue (but has a helluva learning curve - at least for me) and costs money.
Maybe use photoshop and make a composite of various elements from google maps / Google Earth etc.
As it stands, the drawing on the left could be tarted up to look quite nice.
If I had a very clean (or vector) version of the map on the right I'd bring it into photoshop, separate the streets, buildings, etc. into layers (try select color range to create a selection that you can fill on a new layer) and then work on those layers separately. Then you can paint on textures, add additional detail separately.
The one on the right looks very cool...but it doesn't look much like a city. I will say that Ravells' suggestion would be a cool way to go...if you had the cash. I've seen some neat sci-fi city stuff turned out of that.
M
This needs to be more of the vector type than real life, I just cant think of how to present the city in a professional way, that looks right, and it needs to be in B/W or grayscale.
Heres the original map from the book, which I think looks bad.
If it wasnt this time of the year, I would look at it and work out what to do, but this time of yesr my head wont work, cant wait for the warmer weather.
Haven city map orig.jpgHaven city streets.jpg
Last edited by Digger2000; 03-04-2011 at 12:49 PM.
oh...have you thought about copyright issues?
Im part of the Dev team for Blue Planet 3, we hold the licence.
Ah well, that's ok then!
The one on the right looks ok, but the line weights are pretty horrid. Rectilinear grids are fine for modern cities, but maybe you could break up the lots a bit...make them slightly less uniform? I really like the story the city tells, with the 'floats' and buildup over the channels. The real question is what information do you want the map to convey?
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