[Region 1][Map 27][Town 01]Argria

[mearrin69]

Thanks for that Coyotemax. Well, there you go. I guess it's all legal-like, unless I'm reading it incorrectly. Does you posting that link count as attribution?
M

[Coyotemax]

I would think so, though to be safe I'd add it as a footnote to the finished map thread when it happens

[mearrin69]

I see now that it has been ages since I posted an update. I've been buried under mounds of work but this map's pretty easy to open up in Illustrator for half an hour and do some building sketching. Been doing that for the past couple of weeks. Progress has been slow but I'm almost there. Just a couple of small sections and then some clean-up and detailing to do...then I can take it into PS to work it over with fanciness. I'll keep inching along on it; going to be busy for some time to come with real-world work and such but I'll eventually get it done. Seems like there's not much going on in CWBP so I'm hoping others will join in again.
M

[edit]Oh yeah, still open to name suggestions. Most of the existing placeholders aren't all that great.[/edit]

[Steel General]

This is turning out quite nicely Mearrin...

[mearrin69]

Finished up the building shapes in Illustrator and brought them into Photoshop tonight.

Had a go with creating one of the building styles (a sort of adobe/stucco thing with a flat roof and low walls around it). Took the whole building layer and overlaid it with a seamless sand pattern, duplicated the layer and selected it then contracted the selection and deleted, leaving a 'ring' of textured material. Then I duplicated that layer, moved it below the ring layer, made it black and blurred it, then offset it a few pixels and deleted anything not falling on the building. This gave a shadow for the wall falling onto the top of the building.

So, I plan to create many different building styles - both variations of this one and other things like tiles, shingles, tents, etc. Then I'll just erase out the ones I don't want from each layer. Special buildings like the hippodrome, tower, etc. will get their own treatment, of course. It's kind of cool to see the whole city done up like the attached picture, though. I can't wait until I have a few building styles and erase them out...want to see how it looks.

Also, right now the shadow is single-height. Later I'm going to vary the height in places to suggest taller buildings, etc. I'll have to make a special shadow layer for the tower, fortress walls, and other really tall structures, as they're going to fall across other buildings.
M

[Ascension]

Looks nice. All I can think of is that they're all the same color, some little bit of color variation might go well. Good job so far, though.

[mearrin69]

Thanks. Definitely will have lots of variation in the colors...plus other building styles in there. Will probably make sense once I get some of those in there. Will try to come up with a sample to show what I'm talking about.
M

[Coyotemax]

Holycarp! I'm not typically a fan of this style of building creation, but for this purpose it really works well. The shadows will really work to give it dimension once you customize them, yowza!

[industrygothica]

I had that reverse 3D thing going on for a minute where everything looked puffy and weird, but my brain finally sorted it out after a minute. It looks really great!

[Steel General]

Looking good...

I've used that method before as well, and a modified version of it on my Shadizaar map.