Naserian

[wdmartin]

Some progress. Not a whole lot; basically, I added the university buildings. And the observatory, which is part of the university. Here's a blown-up detail view of the area I just poured four hours into:

Naserian-05-detail.jpg

And the full size map.

Naserian-05.jpg

Todo:

- Cathedral/shrine
- Dirty up the points of interest to make them less clean and shiny looking
- More trees
- More vines
- Outlet for the pool of water
- Figure out some better color variation on the tree canopy

[darkseed2012]

How destroyed is this town gonna get? It already looks like Pripyat, Ukraine, I guess that's a compliment.

[wdmartin]

Thanks! I guess. And if Pripyat looks like that, well, I am heartily sorry for everyone in Pripyat.

I spent a bunch of time working on the trees. I've got sixteen layers of understory now, and three layers of smaller trees.

Then I spent ages trying to get more color variation in them. The Pattern Overlay adjustment that was providing the tree texturing proved stubbornly resistant to any kind of modification. Rasterizing the layer effects worked poorly: the trees wound up with a weird sort of halo around them, which looked awful. So eventually I gave up and removed the Pattern Overlay adjustment. The initial effect of that was ... amusing.

Naserian-06.jpg

Apparently I had a hue jitter set on my forest brushes which had been covered up by the pattern overlay. Welcome to the psychedelic jungle!

I fixed that by putting some clipping layers full of green texture on top of those, then adding lightness adjustment layers to some of them with cloud masks.

Naserian-07.jpg

I am not sure whether it's better or not. There are a lot more trees, sure. They're still pretty similar in color, though with at least a little more color variation. But I'm not sure it's actually, you know, better than it was before. I'll have to sleep on it.

[Turambar]

Naserian-07.jpg

I am not sure whether it's better or not. There are a lot more trees, sure. They're still pretty similar in color, though with at least a little more color variation. But I'm not sure it's actually, you know, better than it was before. I'll have to sleep on it.

I think it looks good. If you want to improve the trees, I would do two things: 1. Adding shadows beneath the tree canopy as well as cast shadows for trees on the edge would do a lot. 2. You can add a layer above the trees in color mode and color in some slight color variation here and there.

Other than the trees, I think some other parts of your map would look really good with some shadow work done, including the cliff faces and the dome on the big building. You could alos add some shadow length variation for buildings that are supposed to be taller, to give the city more depth. Overall, looking really good!

[wdmartin]

I took a break for a while, but have circled back to this. Some progress:

Naserian-08.jpg

Changes:

Added a large shrine
Darkened the points of interest to make them match the rest of the city a bit more closely
Added a stream as an outlet for the water
Put a Saturation adjustment layer over top of the trees and applied it with irregular shapes on the mask

Plus lots of shadow work, including more shadows for the walls, for taller buildings, on the dome of the Hall of Sky, for the understory beneath the jungle, and on the cliffs at the bottom. I'm still not happy with those cliffs. I think the rest of it is more or less how I want it, but the cliffs just aren't working quite right.

[Turambar]

Well done! You are really nailing the abandoned feeling with the overgrown streets and buildings.