15 - [Inner] The Ward of Erahum [Mouse]

[Mouse]

Ok. This should fry your brain, even if the upside down thing didn't.

So - I rotate everything the right way up, and it should all be fine, right?

Naaaah - not for this mouse!

Area 15 Version 04.jpg

Perfect, you think - what's wrong with that? What are you making all this song and dance about Mouse?

Well... draw back a bit and look down on the view...

Area 15 Version 04.jpg

Can you see it now?

I have a perfect copy, and its all the right way up now I've rotated it, but its a perfect mirror copy, as can be seen by the roads. Closer up I can see all the ridiculous details I modelled down to the door panels on the first tower. They are all mirrored - everything is the opposite way round to the way I modelled it.

How on Earth... There isn't a button for mirroring things as far as I can see!

[Mouse]

Its ok. I found it now. Though it doesn't explain why this mirroring happened in the first place, the command to use is 'Flip Along' rather than the usual 'mirror' (which is probably why I completely missed it when I was looking for a 'mirror'), and you can find it in the context menu. There is no button

[Mouse]

One last try with Sketchup...

Started again with the wall because I was suspicious of the first try. I think there may have been some geometry gone astray to have caused an error, so this is a 'start from scratch' job.

Sketchup Version 04.jpg

I've dotted a few Chris's around the place. He's a useful guide when judging scale, though I've had to economise on textures so he's all white like a cricket player.

Having a bit of trouble with smoothed edges. Sometimes they just don't seem to work, but I've discovered that using the mirror function (eg flip on red axis) and then flipping them back again usually sets things right - just the affected surfaces, not the entire model Maybe the geometry is still a bit off, but I didn't get an error message this time

[- JO -]

Wow! What a mastery of the software! You learned how to use it in record time! In any case the rendering is magnificent! Very lively! Are you planning to do the whole map in 3D ?

[kacey]

You certainly are a fast learner, and it's interesting to see you go through the process as you go. You're definitely having more luck with sketchup then I did. I will say though that my favorite work of yours has been done by hand and coloured with gimp. I would love to see you do a regional map hand drawn on paper and coloured in gimp like you're road to tiamis...I think I spelled that wrong but I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but like a mix of that map, with isometric mountains, regional John Roberts style...sort of, with Mouse mixed in... I don't know if that made sense, I've been awake since 3am yesterday morning so I apologize if it doesn't, either way I'd pay to see a map like that...I really preferred the gimp map you were working on for this, you had some nice cliffs going on, and I just feel like it had so much more charm then what sketchup can produce, unless of course you're going to paint over it, and make it appear hand drawn when you're done the model then that's a different story.

[Mouse]

Wow! What a mastery of the software! You learned how to use it in record time! In any case the rendering is magnificent! Very lively! Are you planning to do the whole map in 3D ?

Thanks Jo

I think Sketchup is waaaaay easier to learn than Blender, and I've spent so many frustrating hours trying to learn Blender that Sketchup is like a bit of light relief in comparison - especially when you have friends here at the Guild who can help you out with all the beginner type problems

I'd give the software a 7 out of 10 for ease of use right now, because of the weirdness it put me through yesterday losing the background map and forcing me to have to start again, just in case the file was permanently corrupted in some way. It would have been 9 out of ten if that hadn't happened. But that's far better than the 2 out of 10 I give Blender. GIMP only has a 4 out of 10 in the same 'ease of use' notebook. These are only my personal ratings, though. It may be different for other people.

I'm intending to do all the buildings in Sketchup so I can export them ready-rendered and finished to GIMP - shadows included - like Ilanthar has done with his district, only with the buildings fully rendered and mostly complete (apart from a bit of ageing and weathering... a bit of old battle damage. The corners need knocking off a bit, and there need to be a considerable number of stains and cracks to make it look a bit less... plastic(?) ). The modelling will also give me a huge resource to work from in terms of mapping smaller areas.

I'm thinking of sharing the finished file (if that's possible even, considering most of the textures are mine), so that others can pick a building and make an interior, or add a dungeon - just like we planned in the beginning

You certainly are a fast learner, and it's interesting to see you go through the process as you go. You're definitely having more luck with sketchup then I did. I will say though that my favorite work of yours has been done by hand and coloured with gimp. I would love to see you do a regional map hand drawn on paper and coloured in gimp like you're road to tiamis...I think I spelled that wrong but I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but like a mix of that map, with isometric mountains, regional John Roberts style...sort of, with Mouse mixed in... I don't know if that made sense, I've been awake since 3am yesterday morning so I apologize if it doesn't, either way I'd pay to see a map like that...I really preferred the gimp map you were working on for this, you had some nice cliffs going on, and I just feel like it had so much more charm then what sketchup can produce, unless of course you're going to paint over it, and make it appear hand drawn when you're done the model then that's a different story.

Thank you Kacey

Sketchup works very much like my imagination, in that its a bit like modelling something with toy building blocks that you can shape. The tutorials on the webpage are absolutely superb, and I do most of my learning the primitive way - by watching the masters in action. I seem to take things in about 10 times as fast if I can watch it done by someone else first

I did the Road to Tiamis on an A3 pad, and it took me forever. To get the required amount of detail for a regional map I would need to work at A2, or even A1, since my drawings are not exactly miniature, and that would take me maybe a couple of months if I did at least an hour each day. I spend way too much time looking at what's already there and changing my mind about the design. I have been thinking about doing another one, but I've things like this to be finished first

Its only the buildings and their shadows I'm using from Sketchup. I have to make a rough attempt at the terrain so that the shadows are distorted in the right way to make the map look right when I've done the landscape on the underlying layers in GIMP - so yes, It will be a GIMP map with Sketchup buildings and shadows

[Mouse]

I found these links extremely helpful in learning how to use Sketchup...

Sketchup tutorials:

Beginner: https://www.sketchup.com/learn/videos/846

Self Paced learning: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/col...725c514c21d975

Sketchup add ons:

trees.jpg

RP treemaker available here: http://www.3darcstudio.com/downloads...up-plugin.html

I've downloaded this one, but haven't had a chance to play with it yet. If its as good as it looks I don't think 10 Euros is too much to pay for it

EDIT: I've just created the above image in 30 seconds flat by importing tree models created by other Sketchup artists and freely available on the Sketchup site. Thing is, though, that they would only be any use in landscape view, since they turn out to be image planes, rather than 3D objects Never mind! It was worth a try.

[Mouse]

I'm really not very good at this...

Below is an ISO view of the entire extent of Area 15. There's no terrain as yet, and for some reason one of the labels has gone wrong and produced a blacked out section. The blocks of the city are only marked with grey outlined areas, and only very roughly. Even the old fort that is now a hospital is still on the base level, which won't be the case once I've done the terrain, and lifted all the component parts of it up to the right level.

Sketchup Version 06.JPG

[kacey]

The buildings look great so far, and With J's shading the ground already looks raised at this angle, it's interesting to see the different perspective.

[Mouse]

Thanks Kacey

I feel almost ashamed to show such little progress yet, and after all this time, but I suppose that is the cost of learning all this new stuff

I used an ISO view simply because John's shading worked better that way to indicate the high ground, and because the top down view isn't really all that exciting just yet. I need to build a lot more stuff! LOL!