Toonsville - a map to appear in a comic book!

[Caenwyr]

For his new comic book series, Mandril, P.I., author Christopher Brimmage needed a map to showcase the city where the adventures of his protagonist take place. Here's a short description of the place by the author himself:

Toonsville is a 1950s-style noir metropolis teeming with cartoon creatures of every imaginable species whose lives and traditions are governed by cartoon tropes.

The center of the city is a dilapidated, black-and-white neighborhood named The Grays that was created before color entered the world. Neighborhoods grew outward from there as new cartoons were created and new characters/species were invented. With few exceptions (Manny being one), species of toons tend to live in the neighborhoods created for them (e.g. The Rabbit Hole for rabbits, The Turtle Shell for turtles, Man-Hattan for humans).

And here's the link to the Kickstarter!

Client was happy with me sharing my progress with you guys so here goes. They provided me with a wonderful sketch and a pretty extensive legend, so I could get started with the clean version right away. The plan is to work my way through the legend, adding the neighbourhoods one by one.

1. First on the list was the Grays! The area reflecting the early days of comic books. As you can imagine, I added it in 100% grey;
2. Next I added the Rabbit Hole, a patch of grassy hills tall as high-rise buildings, riddled with rabbit holes (as the name suggests);
3. West of that is the Duckpad, with a rather suburban section situated around a large (duck) pond and a larger, much more populated section filled with tenements;
4. And in the north is a neighbourhood called the Mouse House. This starts as a rather pleasant part of town, complete with a conference hall shaped like a giant cheese, but quickly devolves into a series of slums and shanty towns surrounded by tall, very shoddy tenements inhabited by – you guessed it – mice.

Toonsville (2021.05.26b).jpg

And that's as far as I got! Next up will be Little Mexico, a large area west of Duckpad that is home to Cowboy and Native Indian cartoons... and a whole series of movie studios!

[Caenwyr]

Okay, polling time! Which version do you guys prefer?

1. Top-down?
   Toonsville (2021.05.27a).jpg
2. Or perspective?
   Toonsville (2021.05.27b).jpg

Just a small section of the map has undergone the "perspectivization" of course. The eastern and western bits are still strictly top-down.

I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time to set up a system to "easily" draw the perspective version. With it, I should now be able to draw a quick top-down layout in a smart object, save it, go to the base file and use several versions of the same smart object (at different scales) as the basis for the 3D version. It's still more time consuming than doing just the top-down, but it takes away hours and hours of meticulous line-drawing to the center point of the image. Still, if the client decides to go for this option, I'm going to hate myself eventually for even proposing it .

Also, the perspective bit isn't all that changed since the last update. I added four quick towers to get the effect across, but as you can see I also added another neighbourhood: Little Mexico. It's mostly an over the top cowboy and indian Wild West area surrounding a huge movie studio. Before I got distracted by my perspective idea I managed to get all of the terrain, and about half of the buildings done.

[Caenwyr]

Hi guys,

Client prefers to go on with the top-down version for now, so that's what I do. Since the last update, I added the northern bit of Little Mexico, the film studio section and a large park north of that. I removed the for skyscrapers and in its place there's now a large red light district

Toonsville (2021.06.07b).jpg

[Caenwyr]

Another update! The first towers of Man-Hattan have appeared in what is (hopefully) a nice transition with lowrise buildings. Everything north of this section will be crazy high towers, so that should go reasonably fast!

Toonsville (2021.06.18a).jpg

[Voolf]

That is an excellent project you are working on. Very interesting concept and it looks great so far.

[Caenwyr]

Thanks Rafal!

Here's another update, this time with all of Man-Hattan finished!

Toonsville (2021.06.24b).jpg

But hoo boy did it take long: well over 8 hours! All of the shading got me. Once we get to lower buildings again, I'm sure I'll move along faster. But I wanted to get it right, not vague and unconvincing.

Most of the region is fairly typical for a skyscraper city: tall, slender towers with lots of glass (although in this top-down version you can only see the concrete roofs of the buildings except for those that have a slight angle to them. So I added a fair amount of "cheese graters", pointy pyramids and other tapering shapes). No two buildings are equally tall, as witnessed by the shadows, and there's a ton of variety in shapes and sizes. Bonus points if you can find the helipad!

Then there's Futuropolis, a futuristic section near the northern edge of Man-Hattan. The most eye-catching feature here is the massive tower adorned with two discs like looming UFOs. There's two versions of the image in attachment: one with just this massive tower, and one where it also has lights pouring from the bottom illuminating the lower buildings (which are still skyscrapers in their own right!). Apart from this one huge building, there's also a modern take on a triumphal arch just to the west, a large blocky conference hall-type building with an undulating purple roof and a sprawling hall (covering 8 blocks!) with an orange roof made of interlocking facets, like a gem. finally, there's this one building in the bottom right with six identical super tall and super slender towers dwarfing almost all other buildings. These towers have pulsating orange lights at the top.

[limon]

Great work. I just wanted to say that your work inspired me to dive into isometric map making projects, thanks for opening my eyes. I love how you use the shadows. Keep up the good work.

[Diamond]

This is... insane. In a good way! How big is this thing going to be exactly? Just wondering, because I've already spent like half an hour poring over all the cool little details.

[DEWLine]

Count me impressed with the work already done!

[Caenwyr]

Okay, looks like it's been a while since I last updated this thread. The past half year been crazy busy for me. The good kind of busy (I'm definitely not complaining!) but it did mean that mapping sort of went on the backburner for a while. I still did some work on this map from time to time, but maybe a few hours a month as compared to my usual 50-ish hours per month that I spend on mapping.

But! Since I felt I had kept client waiting long enough (they were very understanding, but still!), I decided to take three days off from the muggle job and spend all of them on this map. In all I managed to get about 20 hours of work done. Phew!

Okay, let's give you an overview of what I added since my last update here on CG, back in June:

• Turtle Shell (the neighbourhood housing turtles, with the buildings shaped like giant turtle shells);
• Toad Hollow (a bunch of buildings literally made from drooping mud);
• The Fishbowl (a giant fish tank rising a dozen stories above street level, complete with two shipwrecks);
• Capitol Hill (in the southeast: a rocky outcrop with a number of Roman-style government buildings on top, and a bunch of houses crammed around it);
• Kitty Corner (a giant scratching post, with blocky volumes interconnected with cilindrical elevator shafts covered in hemp rope);
• Chipmunk Court (a supertall pine forest)
• Pig Pen (a large neighbourhood with the poorest pigs living in the SW corner in straw huts, the middleclass pigs living in wooden houses and the ultrarich pigs in their brick mansions among their factories);
• the Dog Pound (a European-style neighbourhood with huge fire hydrants in 4 colours allowing dog people of 4 genders to answer the call of nature);
• Squirrel Nook (another pine forest, albeit smaller and with a different type of trees);
• Mole Hole (on the face a field of grass with a bunch of molehills, but underground there's a massive city);
• Vulture Village (with a nice craggy rock in the middle and a bunch of dead trees for the vultures to sit on. Oh yeah, the houses are made from bone);
• Skunk Shacks (based on the Pepe LePew version of France, including an Eifel Tower and an Arc de Triomphe);
• Woodpecker Willows (another little forest, this time with decidious trees);
• Fox Hollow (an English architecture village-within-the-city with tons of fox burrows);
• the Otter Box (a large body of water with clumps of otter houses on floating platforms);
• Wolf's Den (a series of rocky hills with caves. On top of the highest hill there's an observatory with a telescope aimed right at the next neighbourhood); and finally
• the Sheep Pen (not so romantic as it sounds: a neighbourhood filled with textile factories, with tenements built on top that house the sheep workers).

Bonus points if you can identify all of them on the map without a key!

Toonsville (2021.12.09a).jpg

And that's all I have for now. It's progressing nicely, but I still have to add 75 more neighbourhoods, so don't hold your breath just yet!