New Town

[Turgenev]

I decided to work on a new town. I used RPG City Generator to spark my imagination and went on from there. This is what I have so far:
town001.jpg

It is in the same style as my Town of Ardkeep map. It is far from being done but it is getting there. I'm using Photoshop 7.0 and I drew the house types by hand and scanned them into the computer (in some cases, I drew them right on the computer in the first place). I have a few more things I want to do - one of which is try to find a way to add elevation to the ground that matches the rest of the map style. I'm experimenting with a few styles now. Any ideas would be most welcomed.

[Steel General]

Aha! Finally crawled away from the dungeon making!

Looking good so far - Like the way you did the fields, I think they came out really good.

The trees could use a little work though - I think maybe a bit of blur to hide the bevel.

[landorl]

Looks great! How did you do the fields? I love them!

[Ascension]

Yeah, those fields kick. For the trees, change the highlight of the bevel from white to something yellow or yellow-green or try changing it from screen to color dodge...this removes the whiteness. For adding elevation, add a layer of 50% gray above the terrain but below everything else (set it to overlay), then use the dodge tool to add height and the burn tool to add depth (especially around the rivers). Lookin good though If you're feeling adventurous, do up some really tightly packed difference clouds (like 20 iterations for something really crunchy) then delete the blacks and dark grays (select - color range = black with a fuzziness of 200), add an outer bevel and set the fill to zero...this will give you a lot of hills and ridges but make sure to erase the bits over the river.

[Turgenev]

Thanks for the suggestion, SG. I will take that into account. I'll probably spend more time on the trees as I get done with the town proper.

As for the fields. They were rather simple to create. First, I created a selection on its own layer in a rectangle shape. I filled it with a colour and then added Noise Filter (amount = 5.41) to it.

Then on a new layer above it, I drew a brown line with a brush (with scattering clicked on in the Brush Presets option) down the side of the field. I then duplicated that layer and moved it over a little bit to the right. I merged that layer back into the brush layer (now there are two lines instead of one). Then I duplicated it again and moved the results to the right. Again, I merged that layer backed and now had four lines instead of two. I repeated the process until I had enough lines covering the field (in fact I had additional lines so I erased them). This whole process didn't take long and it made sure I got consistent results with the line that I might not have done so by drawing all of them free hand.

I keep the colour layer and the lines layer separated. I then duplicated both of these layers and marked them as my templates. I used them to create additional fields of different colours and when I was done, I hide my template layers (for future use). Once I was happy with the way the fields looked, I then merged the colour and line layers together so each coloured field is on its own layer for ease of placement.

I hope that made sense.

[Turgenev]

Yeah, those fields kick. For the trees, change the highlight of the bevel from white to something yellow or yellow-green or try changing it from screen to color dodge...this removes the whiteness. For adding elevation, add a layer of 50% gray above everything but below the houses (set it to overlay), then use the dodge tool to add height and the burn tool to add depth (especially around the rivers). Lookin good though

Thanks for the tips, Ascension. We were on the same wavelength for the elevation but I didn't even consider the above for the trees. I can't wait to try it out.

[Steel General]

Maybe you can write up a mini-tut for this? Lots of folks would find this handy I think.

[Turgenev]

Maybe you can write up a mini-tut for this? Lots of folks would find this handy I think.

That's a good idea. I could include screen caps of each step to help with the explanation and to make sure I didn't forget anything in my above explanation. I'll see what I can do over the next couple of days.

[Hoel]

Great style. I think all the stuff I thought of has been covered.
I do like the bridge, it's really pretty

[ravells]

really nice fields. The best I've seen in a long time. A long time.