[WIP] City of Anhrush

[woodb3kmaster]

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.

[jylny]

What is the scale of the map? Geographically, the shape of the rivers/lakes pique my interest.

[Mornagest]

This is interesting ! Your topographic lines are well placed, yet maybe a bit dense.

Maybe you could soften them ? They are a bit pixellised in comparison with your other elements such as river, buildings...

Good luck !

[woodb3kmaster]

What is the scale of the map? Geographically, the shape of the rivers/lakes pique my interest.

The WIP I showed in the first post has a scale of 1 meter per pixel, but it's a double-size export of my actual map (so I'm mapping at 2m/px).

This is interesting ! Your topographic lines are well placed, yet maybe a bit dense.

Maybe you could soften them ? They are a bit pixellised in comparison with your other elements such as river, buildings...

Good luck !

Thanks! As I mentioned just above your quote, that first WIP is at 200% scale, which is why the contour lines look so pixelated (everything else looks fine because it's vector art, while the background is a bitmap). At present, I'm just using them as a guide to street placement, but I might end up keeping them if there's enough interest in me doing so.

After several months of inaction, I decided to redo the map's terrain, as I thought the original fractal topography wasn't realistic enough. Fortunately, Terragen's alpine fractal produces much more natural-looking results (though at a cost to performance), so I'm once again hard at work on this map. Here's the latest WIP, and the first to use the new terrain:

anhrush3-wip04.png

I decided to bring back some elements from the very old map I linked to in my OP after re-reading my description of the city based on that map - specifically, the radial grid surrounding the imperial palace, the triangular grid in the northwest, and several landmarks around the city. As always, C&C is much appreciated.

[woodb3kmaster]

It's been a few days, so it's time for a new WIP!

anhrush3-wip05.jpg

The biggest addition this time around is the borders of the city's 21 administrative districts. These districts are numbered in an outward spiral (similarly to the arrondissements of Paris, but counter-clockwise), with districts 1-4 comprising the original city. Drawing these boundaries will help me place major buildings more consistently, as each district is supposed to have a certain number of each type of building. I've already drawn each district's main plaza and administrative offices since adding the borders, and I've gotten started on the police stations and fire brigades (both colored gray, as part of the "public safety" category) as well.

A less obvious change may be that I've redone the contour lines at twice their original resolution, since I prefer to export the map at this larger size.

I look forward to getting some more feedback on this map.

[Mouse]

This is promising to be a very exceptional city map

I can see that you are still having a bit of a pixilation problem with your contour lines. Perhaps I can help?

I hope you don't mind...

I took a very small section of your last WIP image and enlarged it to twice its original size. Then I zoomed in to 200% and followed one of the more obviously pixelated contours with a parallel line that I drew using the very slightly fuzzy edged round brush at 5 pixels in size, with a mid tone grey.

Then I reduced the extract back to its original size to see if it made any difference to the smoothness of the line, and it seems to me to have helped quite a lot.

contour experiment.jpg

I worked out that to do this for the whole image you would have to enlarge the original to app 12000 x 12000, which is a very large size for a small computer like the one I use, so I understand if you don't want to do this to the entire map, but maybe if you enlarged a jpg export of your main map file and blew it up to those proportions you could trace the contours on a separate layer, which could then be exported as a transparent png and imported back into your main map and reduced back to that scale.

The pixilation is caused by having such precisely sharp edged lines. Whereas it is usually desirable in a map to have precision, it can at times create more problems than its worth in a raster image - an image displayed in pixels. (Vector lines in a vector based app would automatically have been antialiased both on the screen and in export to a bitmap image, but if you don't have the luxury of using a vector drawing app, then this is one of the easier ways we can mimic the effect)

[- JO -]

The work on the relief is excellent! This is very promising for the rest of the map !