Assault on Trenth. City and surroundings

[Steel General]

This is shaping up quite nicely.

[landorl]

I really love the way that you did the fields surrounded by hedgerows. It looks like Normandy in WWII.

[Dain]

First of all, thanks for these replies, it's always a pleasure to get comments from our own work
Thanks for that!

very nice.. .I'm with ravs on the hedges/thin treelines - they are rather thick if you compare them to a house. Out here where I live in the almost country there usually is a single line of trees between fields (if any) - and they often stand far enough from each other that farm equipment can pass without problems. Sometime you can have a road there instead

Well, I must admit the hedges are indeed quite thick. I used to live in a region with a lot of fields (Oise department in France) and I agree that the gap between two fields is usually filled with a road or a single line of trees ... in the 20th century anyway. I assumed that in medieval times (Officially from 5th to 15th century) fields are less organised but are rather a patchwork of barely shaped fields. No machines, no high-technology tools, just wooden tools and bare hands. The reason modern fields are so square and borders so thin is all about maximize lands and efficiency. It wasn't the case in middle age I reckon. Well, I think, I wasn't there obviously

Wow. I'm really digging your fields. The houses are a little colorful, but I don't think it detracts too much - might knock them back to see how it looks. Agree with Ravells: I love your hand-drawn map. Fancy digital maps are pretty and all but a little RPG map scrawled grid paper...or a napkin...always takes me back.
Not opposed to the huge hedgerows either. Check out the hedgrow insanity that took place during WWII. I reckon those hedges were pretty thick...believe even the tanks had trouble getting through them (though that may have been ditches too). This is going to look pretty sweet when done.
M

I chose colorful houses mainly after the damn nice masterpiece of mearrin69 (http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...hlight=haibian) It is a so beautiful map that I wanted to try to steal some ideas and hopefully improve the level of mine. The hand drawn map was made in approx. 5 min just to shape out the main things I wanted to do

Excellent! Those fields are just corking! You've captured the bizarre randomness of field layout very well. Don't be lead astray by hedgerow widths too much! You have some single row hedges in the mix! Hedges often provide windbreaks and if your prevailing winds are high, well, thicker widths would be about right.
For some of the best in olde worlde hedgerows I would scan around Cornwall, UK in googlemaps satellite but it would seem you've already done something like already.
One issue I have in the fields is the blurry effect I get in patches, it kinda makes my eyes go wonky.
I'm not the guy to comment on drawing style but I do wax lyrical on logical issues occasionally! My pennies worth would be:
The bare patches - you wondered what to do here? If the land there is raised (nice scarp slope and so forth) you can make it moorland, loose scrub used for sheep and so forth. Try looking north of "Simonsbath, Exmoor" on googlemaps for that line between moorlands and agricultural...
The river needs some thought. Since the town walls are relying on the river as part of the defensive "line" then it must be deep enough for river traffic. It's certainly wide enough for barges and so forth. That would likely mean docks etc, if there is good trade, and the wealth to afford (and need) the walls in the first place!
Issues: the bridges. I don't see why these are outside the walls. As a defensive measure they make it easy for an enemy to cross over and surround the town. I would have put one bridge in, inside the walls, as it were. It puts the river crossing under town control, both for defence AND possible tolls! Money, money money! The road to the SE bridge looks a tad long and wandering?? Where are the interconnecting roads to "other places, yonder"? Are they rural meandering roads using contour lines or straight military (like roman) roads?
The buildings: I'm all in favour of different colours. Roofs can be tile, reeds, shingles, wood, even grass... what doesn't quite mix well for me is that you have those lovely random field patterns but the town streets are rather linear and gridlike.

There you are you see? I talk to much. I hope you take these as constructive comments!
Good luck and have some rep!

Jeeze, that's quite a comment! Thanks for the time spent to write this
Ok, I'll give you mine now
You actually remind me very well that the main purpose od hedges is about protection from wind, avoiding to ruin the whole field of weat or sunflower, quite fragile. Good point, which actually helps me getting the map right
I did actually googled picture fields to get a better idea of the randomness of colours. It seems It ws a good idea and that I did not too bad

The blurry effect was in fact a try of managing the possible variation of height of the trees. Now that I look at them ... I don't know whether I need to put my glasses on or not :/ .All right, I removed the blur, next version will be a litle bit more sharp
Thanks to your advice, I worked on the countryside. Tell me how you find it

The north side of the city is actually a harbour where ships can dock. There will be abandoned ferries along the river, according to the recommendations of the commissioner. The width of the river is supposed to be about 300m. Arrows from the shores would have few chances to reach a boat in motion shipping from/to the city. That was also a requirement from the commisioner.

the bridges ... you pinponted a big one, they are far too long. A 300m long bridge in middle age (It's actually for Middle earth)? No way. I reshaped to coast so now, there is a meaning why they are there and not closer to the city. Because of the narrower location, making easier to build something there. Along with the adventure, the bridges are taken by orcs but ships can still move around. PCs have to get across the land, the river to get finally in the city. BTW, I put houses arund the bridges for tolls

About the roads ... well interesting. Main roads (stone road/ roman roads) that add more explaination about toll bridges and still other rough roads. I'll try to make something about that, with texture if not just different sizes
Thanks again. It really helped to get a better full picture of the map.


And here is another step of the map. rough lines of the inside of the Fortress is added, as well as the country side
Roads are too big and need to be redone. I'll also add more houses here and there.

Keep up the comment guys, it energize me!

[mearrin69]

I chose colorful houses mainly after the damn nice masterpiece of mearrin69 (http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...hlight=haibian) It is a so beautiful map that I wanted to try to steal some ideas and hopefully improve the level of mine. The hand drawn map was made in approx. 5 min just to shape out the main things I wanted to do

Ha! Flattery will get you everywhere. You've got such nice-looking, realistic terrain going here that I was thinking they'd look a little better muted. Did you tone them down some in the latest? It doesn't jump out at me so much. The couple of brighter red ones can certainly be justified as "special" buildings (temple or houses of ill repute or something) that happen to be a bit more garish.

BTW, didn't mention this in my first comments but the land seems to float a little above the water. Not sure how to "tamp it down" but I think it'd improve the look...unless that's specifically what you were going for.

I suspect that, when this one is done, you'll have a few followers of your own. Nice stuff so far!

[Dain]

Well, sometimes flattery and evidence are brothers as your map is brilliant. It was an easy comment of mine.

The river does indeed seem be under the land. It is something I try to fix from the earliest stage but yet to solve. I first thought to give some transparency to be able to see the bottom, the underwater relief but also have some shiny effect, simulations ripples and small waves. Another issue is that some areas are supposed to be cliffs and some other just smooth shores, kind of tiny beaches. A global solution with style isn't going to make it.
I'll see what I can do, you'll tell me then (I hope)

There is something else I want to work on. The houses, and not only the color, which is just now a base to get a better feedback of the render. The problem I've got with them is their shape. I use square, round and rectangle brushes but the villages/ packs of houses look like ... a campervan park. Too straight, too ... just too much. I believe you hand drawn all your buildings and used a quick mask to fill quickly the houses with color without paying too much attention. But I believe you decided to keep the hand drawn lining for the shape of the houses. It gives something important to the atmosphere of the map, I reckon. On mine, I used the "stroke" layer style but it doesn't work very well. The blending of the drop shadow and stroke doesn't mix very well. I'll try the hand drawn lining and put it above the color layer. It should be much better, what do you reckon?

[mearrin69]

Well, if you look at my WIP thread you'll see that I did, in fact, try to draw the buildings in PS at first but it just didn't work out. I think you're right that drawing by hand and scanning gave it a little something. They weren't perfect (far from it) but it gave it a little style...they weren't *trying* to be perfect so it turned out okay. I just wasn't having any luck doing it by hand. I think your map calls for a little "perfect" though, since your terrain is so realistic. Do you have access to a vector art program? If so you might try laying out the buildings in that as nice shapes and then bringing them into PS as a new layer. That yielded nice results in my Argria city map...and also my Docks of Haibianr map. I just took a snip of a sketch and then drew the building shapes in Illustrator. Also, if you can do a bevel layer over white and then rasterize and hand-modify it I have found that gives a little more variety (and realism)...place it over the building color/texture on Multiply. A "grunge" layer (use some parchment or something) clipped to the house shapes also seems to go a long way toward creating variety.
M

[Dain]

Well, if you look at my WIP thread you'll see that I did, in fact, try to draw the buildings in PS at first but it just didn't work out. I think you're right that drawing by hand and scanning gave it a little something. They weren't perfect (far from it) but it gave it a little style...they weren't *trying* to be perfect so it turned out okay. I just wasn't having any luck doing it by hand. I think your map calls for a little "perfect" though, since your terrain is so realistic. Do you have access to a vector art program? If so you might try laying out the buildings in that as nice shapes and then bringing them into PS as a new layer. That yielded nice results in my Argria city map...and also my Docks of Haibianr map. I just took a snip of a sketch and then drew the building shapes in Illustrator. Also, if you can do a bevel layer over white and then rasterize and hand-modify it I have found that gives a little more variety (and realism)...place it over the building color/texture on Multiply. A "grunge" layer (use some parchment or something) clipped to the house shapes also seems to go a long way toward creating variety.
M

I've also done many drawing by hand (My DevianArt page and really like the kind of softness it has, as well as the joy doing it. And I agree, it's hard to make it perfect, if possible, but it gives it something that can't be reproduced with digitalized maps.
I understand as well that because of the lands are as much realistic as I can, the houses have to match some way the same pattern. I'll give it a try with a clipping layer of a papyrus or aged paper. That's actually a very good idea! thanks for that

About vector progs, I've only got Inkscape and could probably do something. The only issue is that I'm not quite sure how to proceed. Did youmean to roughly draw the houses in PS and load that in Illustrator? Then reshape the houses?

[mearrin69]

Something like that. For Docks of Haibianr I zoomed into my PS file and then cropped it to the area I wanted. Then I opened up Illustrator and placed the image and then drew shapes that matched, roughly, the shapes in the original image...land in a layer, buildings in a layer, forests in a layer, etc. Then I just traced over the various areas (I used boxes for the building shapes, sometimes two and then merged them for more complex shapes. Once done I just saved the individual layers and then pasted them into a new file in PS and used those as a starting point for creating my various map layers.

For Argria, I started with a very rough sketch (mainly of roads) and did the same thing...except I just built and placed the buildings freeform as I went, following the roads. Here's the map I'm talking about if you haven't seen it:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...1-Argria/page9
It's quite different from Haibianr, more like my more-realistic recent maps. Here's the latest full map of that one (abandoned for a bit while I catch up on other things):
http://www.cartographersguild.com/at...0&d=1270960021

Now that I look at it again I can see that it's quite bare but the house construction technique was pretty effective, I think.
M

[Crayons]

There is something else I want to work on. The houses, and not only the color, which is just now a base to get a better feedback of the render. The problem I've got with them is their shape. I use square, round and rectangle brushes but the villages/ packs of houses look like ... a campervan park. Too straight, too ... just too much.

Are you talking the shape of individual houses or the shape of the group - e.g. grid stucture?

I can't help you on grids but I have a routine to generate random shaped houses. It's obviously pick'n'mix but if you can cut, scale, paste and rotate a transparent png artefact then would this sort of thing could be handy? Drop shadow would be your problem and (at the moment) the buildings have chimneys and roof slopes that are shaded according to the POVray scene used to generate them.
I can easily randomly rotate them so but then you have to choose the ones you want at the angles available...
Also available in different roof colour/textures and building sizes. They're a part of my 3D Town Generator thingy I'm working on. I can generate more if you like?
workshop.png

[Crayons]

OH, and I meant to say that the hedgerows are much much better! As for the other logic - well if there's a Commissioner involved, that would explain a lot!