Bladechapel battlemap (using Illustrator)

[Wordman]

The roof doesn't have much going on, but is more or less done.

[Wordman]

One of the highlights of Ptolus is that the whole city sits on top of layer upon layer of catacombs. So, the house clearly needs a sub level. This level has almost no detail. The section on the bottom is meant to be the wine cellar, storage and so on. The circular rooms near the center are suppose to have a well and some magical water purification and circulation gizmos. The top right is meant to contain a number of magical workshops (for making scrolls and wands and such). The center rooms are an extension of the armory on the first floor, sort of a weapons depot/vault kind of thing. The bits on the left connect the towers and would contain shelters and maybe cells.

The stairs at the top left exit in the carriage house, behind a stack of barrels. Also, you can see some of the piping that feeds the various water features on the first floor, with waste pipes leading to the sewers.

[Wordman]

Gutters from the upper levels collect rainwater and funnel it through pipes (you can see if you look real close) through the sublevel into a cistern. This level also has tunnels with the pipes running across the ceiling (this is the same piping as indicated on the sublevel).

[aquarits]

Like you said, it is kinda huge and a nice job.

[Wordman]

This map is now as done as it is going to get, downloadable here: Bladechapel battlemap

[Meshon]

It's great to see work done in Illustrator, it's almost always part of my process. I have also used Illustrator gradients to make stair overlays, but I never thought of using the gradient mesh to finish them up, thanks for that tip, it's great! Also, I'm interested to know what you used to do the rough black edging on your catacomb maps, is it an Illustrator brush? The maps looks great, thank you for sharing it!

cheers,
Meshon

Edit: I just had a look at the download link and your notes there too. 1GB for an Illustrator file is huge but I'm not surprised considering the detail you packed in. I'd definitely be interested to hear more about how you converted the seamless textures to vector. I did something like that once and it was a challenge to say the least.

[Carnifex]

Nice work! I have done some work in dungeons and buildings in Illustrator and it's interesting to see some of your solutions. Here's my dungeon and a keep:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/fi...ecret-den.html
http://www.cartographersguild.com/bu...03-castle.html

[lily]

Some preliminary work, mostly just blocking out the rooms. Also a bit of texture work using vector patterns (mostly live traced from bitmaps). A couple of places have some detail (the table, carpet and other objects in the "war room" are placed bitmaps, just to see how that works). The shadows on the stairs in the chapel is me trying to learn how to use meshes.

At battlemap scale, a 200' building is really huge. I'm making the map bigger than I really need at first, so there is quite a bit of space dedicated to the grounds. Will probably trim that off in the final version.

Oh, the swirly bit at the top is a fountain, based on the Knights of the Pale's emblem, which is a sword stabbing deep into a blue vortex (killing the outsiders before they come through, I suppose).

Anyway, the ground floor, with labels (and very reduced in scale):

I have attracted to the site because of this map that i saw on Google. I really loved it. It is so neat and clean.
I have a request from you, Can you send me the Ai file of this map?

[Bogie]

Welcome to the Guild Lily

[Wordman]

I'm interested to know what you used to do the rough black edging on your catacomb maps, is it an Illustrator brush?

Several, actually. I should post a tip someplace on how I did this.

The basic idea was to first build a single shape that outlines the "footprint" of the rooms. You then give this shape no fill and make the stroke black. Now the real trick:

Make a very short line. Select it. Create a new scatter brush based on this line, turning on randomness full blast for rotation, spacing and scatter, and maybe from 90-110% for size.

Take your outline shape and clone it in place five or six times. Apply this new scatter brush to each of the clones. The result vaguely approximates Dyson Logo's style cross-hatching.

I think I also built a second scatter brush with a thinner, longer line and made some clones using it, too.