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

[Coyotemax]

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!

you had that too?? i saw that at first glance, read the post, then saw it normally, and spent like 5 mins trying to get it back with no luck. I passed it off as my meds talking

[mearrin69]

I had it too the first time I looked at the thumbnail in my post after making it...so much so that I opened the pic to make sure something hadn't gone wrong with it. Bit disconcerting. I think it'll go away when I get some different building styles in there. Hope so anyway.

I was looking at some reference pics and decided that the thing needs some stripey cloth awnings and such off of the buildings. What do you guys think?
M

[Coyotemax]

I think that would be quite acceptable It'll look great when you get them in there.

I was also thinking that it might be too much work when you get to the shadows, but if you could chop up some of the connected buildings to give the appearance of different height buildings placed right up next to each other, that would be awesome too (if you follow)

[mearrin69]

Had about an hour total to play tonight...hoping for more free time in the weeks to come.

Anyway, here's a little mucking about with buildings. The solid colored ones are where I've erased out the sandstone/adobe buildings to create some different styles - and there are a couple already in there with different styles of tile roofs (rooves? nah.) I can see now that this might be a really extensive thing to do well...lots of work to make the sloped roofs come out differently. The awnings are just a texture with some color variation warped and placed below the shadow layer...they have their own drop shadow too.

Yeah. Maybe too much work. I haven't even started messing about with ground textures, trees, miscellaneous junk and such. Is this level of detail worth it or should I just color the buildings black, call it a schematic and mark it done? Maybe it's worth the hundreds of hours to create a magnum opus?
M

[Coyotemax]

I think the awnings look great! I had the reverse 3d thing again for a split second

Really it's up to you for the level of detail, a plan would be totally functional - but hey, it's only a significant chunk of your life if you go for full detail, right?

[mearrin69]

I fear this now. The file is now at 275mb. Going to need to do some serious managment of layers to keep it workable. Working at 600ppi (6600x4162) so that the buildings are large enough to be useable. Maybe that's going overboard?

Anyway. Spent a little while on it tonight messing with some more buildings and shading. Haven't figured out how to get the awnings that aren't in shadow to look quite right but the ones in shadow look pretty good. Also played on a macro scale with imposing some realistic-ish ground textures and such. I'm going to put in some tiled areas in courtyards, plants, wells, and things like that.

Still deciding if it's worth it. This level of detail would get lost on the map at full-size. I'll playing with it to see what happens.
M

[edit]N.B. This is at 100% zoom. I guess if you can't see the details at 100% they're not worth putting in?[/edit]

[Ascension]

No no no no no. Gotta have details even if we can't see 'em. 600 ppi is overboard unless you're going to make a poster. It looks great, man. If you want to keep file size down, merge terrain layers or work on one city block and then merge that together. Just remember to save any layer styles before doing so.

[mearrin69]

Thanks for the feedback. I realize now that I've forgotten the reason I spent all that time making building templates in Illustrator: to make it quick and easy to texture the buildings in a variety of styles, make shadows, etc. I think I'm going to stop where I am and roll it back to 300ppi and rough in the building styles. Going house to house at this scale, like I'm trying to take Stalingrad, is going to get me nowhere but crazy. I'm going to have to zoom out and give the impression of detail rather than the detail itself.

BUT I do think there's the opportunity to zoom in and create more detailed district maps at some point...that's one thing having vector building forms gives me.
M

[mearrin69]

Okay, now we're talking. Resized the file to 300ppi (63 MB now) and it's much more workable. I'm not focusing on detail, just using my layer masks to quickly lay down texture and tone. For the sloped roofs I've made a layer, set to multiply, and I'm just quickly painting the roof shades onto that (using a little guide I made to tell me what color I should use for what angle). This came together from scratch in about an hour--much less than I spent cutting out little tile textures and shading rectangles, etc. as I was doing before. Going to try to find some more textures to use...they need some detail but not so much that you can tell they're going the wrong way. I have a weekend of marathon gaming so won't get much done in the next few days but just wanted to say, YAY!
M

[edit]N.B. Forgot to mention that I've got tall buildings in there now. There'll be shorter ones too (which will cast a shorter shadow, but that might not even be noticeable so I might not bother except with the small tents. Second note: this is stil just a test. I've got a color adjustment layer in there that's adding a little too much "candy color" to the buildings. I'll tone all of that down, saving the brighter colors for the awnings, nomad tents, plants, etc.[/edit]

[Coyotemax]

dang, that's shaping up nicely!