Map of the Dawn Republic

[Josiah VE]

Really great 3d models there, great work! Looking forward to seeing them on the map.

[Ilanthar]

Yes, very nice set of buildings! What 3d software are you using?

[Phanues]

Really great 3d models there, great work! Looking forward to seeing them on the map.

Thanks! To be honest i'm probably going overboard with the detail, it's just that i'm using making map icons as an excuse to actually get into 3d modeling a bit more - I'm still really new to it all, but i'd love to get better at it.

Yes, very nice set of buildings! What 3d software are you using?

I use Blender for the most part since it is free. I also have a student license version of Maya installed, but i hesitate in using it since if i ever wanted to use it for commercial purposes a license for the program is pretty expensive.
Still, there's a lot of good tutorials for Maya out there that don't translate 1-on-1 to Blender, and the workflow in Maya is a lot more streamlined. (Blender is a great program in it's own right, but feels kind of awkward to use at times.)

As far as learning goes, the polycount wiki is a good place to start - you'll be able to find a nice list of tutorials there.
I grab my royalty free textures from cgtextures.com (great selection, but a limit on the number of downloads per day) and Texturer.com , since i'm too lazy to make my own.

Progress so far :

i made another model, this time of a larger, more high class house :

IEU6jpJ.png

I did have some problems - the roof turned into a garbled mess - making it resemble more of an eldritch horror out of a Lovecraftian story then a rooftop, for reasons unknown; forcing me to remake it, which cost me an additional 45 minutes to an hour of work.
Having a batch of textures ready to go helps, but mapping them to the polygons in a way that satisfied me took pretty long, which is something i'll need to work on.

More importantly, since i now have a good collection of parts, i decided to put them all together and make an icon. It's not perfect, and there's things i'd like to add/change, but i figured i'd share it here to get some feedback/input.

tUDZsiE.png

I did prettify this shot a little bit by adding in some varied colours for the roofs. It's not a huge change, but if you want to see it, here's the Original render

Some changes i'm likely to make :
- Opening up the walls by placing some gates. - i can use one of the doors for the houses i made, enlarge it and place it as a gate on the city walls - they might be tough to see in the small icon version, but should serve to show how the districts are interconnected.
Some kind of wooden defensive structure atop the wall just something to break things up a little - there's a lot of walls in this particular city, and they look a bit too uniform at the moment for my liking.
more varied structures - i'll probably make at least 2 more structures to incorporate in this city plan - some kind of domed temple structure, and something a bit more reminiscent of a 'court' building (something that looks a bit more high-status.)
streets - depending on how lazy i feel, i might simply paint underneath the render in Photoshop, or i might actually create a texture and overlay it on a plane in my 3D program, we'll see..


As always, any thoughts/suggestions are appreciated, and if you have any questions i'll try my best to answer them.

[tilt]

Really great buildings you're.. building ... the icon you're trying out seems a little stretched. I like the idea of symmetry, but there is way to much castle in respect to city - and the wheel structure seems to keep districts apart + if you breach an outer wall you'll have a clear run to the center and don't have to fight your way through the city to get there. I'd go for a small keep surrounded by houses That would also probably translate better to a map icon which is small and details would disappear.

[Phanues]

Really great buildings you're.. building ... the icon you're trying out seems a little stretched. I like the idea of symmetry, but there is way to much castle in respect to city - and the wheel structure seems to keep districts apart + if you breach an outer wall you'll have a clear run to the center and don't have to fight your way through the city to get there. I'd go for a small keep surrounded by houses That would also probably translate better to a map icon which is small and details would disappear.

Yeah, i felt like i need to break up the shape a bit more as well. The thing is that this is a sample for the icon of the capital city of this region, which has a layout that was already defined by the DM :
90xP7PZ.png

I'm not a fan of the hub and spoke layout either, but i would like to stick to the layout as it exists.
I was thinking of getting rid of the towers on the outer wall entirely, perhaps keeping two on each side of the north and south gates of the outer wall.
I'm also likely to ceate a more circular shape using shorter straight pieces of wall with more divisions so i can break up the shape a bit more.

[DanielHasenbos]

I like the look of this. I'm curious to see what the new icon look like. It's a shame this is only going to be used for symbols. It would be nice to see an entire city build with these models (:

-Dan