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Really nice, from the colors to the layout of the ruins and then the new built.. very impressive.
Cassedega - Built on the Ruins of Ankeshel
This was created for Open Design for their Pathfinder supplement Sunken Empires. I was asked to create a city in two halves - one above the sea and one below - built on top of the ruins of an ancient city that had been sunken beneath the waves and recently re-appeared. Nothing like a challenge
The original city was vastly technologically superior and huge so the current city only needed to occupy some fraction of the ruins. The ancients used concepts of the golden ratio in their work and liked spirals. From that (and a very comprehensive art brief) I created the original city layout:
Once that was done, I wrecked the city and detailed the city in black and white (the original art brief) which ended up looking like this:
The guys at OD decided that they'd like to have it in colour too, so a little more work resulted in the map at the top of the post. I did a short Q&A on the development of the map over on the KQ website. You can find that here.
Now Tilt is really going to have a go at me about my water obsession...
This is commercial work so it is rights reserved.
Really nice, from the colors to the layout of the ruins and then the new built.. very impressive.
This is just gorgeous Torstan! I will have to read the Q & A when I get home from work. Good job capturing the effect of half the city being underwater too. Is this the full resolution image? I'd like to get in there for a closer look and explore if there is one.
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
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Super beautiful! I love the way that you've done the ruins. A real masterpiece this one, Torstan!
Thanks guys. The ruins were an interesting challenge. I drew the base. Then I used some grunge brushes on a mask to really dirty it up and destroy areas so that it looked beaten up. Then I applied the layer mask and merged it down onto a white layer to have a greyscale image. I used threshold to get clean black and white image of the remaining walls. Then select colour gave me the walls as a selection and I converted it to a path.
Once I had that - the outline of all the buildings in their ruined state as a path - I used the photoshop brush panel to create a rubble brush. I took the standard hard round brush, increased the spacing, added some scatter and allowed for jitter on the size and roundness. This does a good job of drawing out a trail of rubble when you draw with it.
I used this brush on two layers. First with very little scatter to create the ruined walls. This more or less gives the white walls you see on the map. Then with much more scatter to give the dark rubble. A little more use of grunge brushes on a mask broke this up and give the underlying city ruins you see on the map! Oh, I used a straightforward drop shadow on the rubble walls to give a little depth. This was background texture so I wasn't going to go drawing all of those in by hand.
As for the size - this was a created as a print for full page at 300dpi, so the original is 2550 by 3300. However, the conversion from 300dpi for print to 100dpi for display on a monitor gives the same experience of the image. As this appears in a printed product (and in the pdf) I can't release the full 300dpi image I'm afraid. Sorry about that.
Great stuff here Torstan!
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Oh, wow -- that is beautiful! What a lot of work!
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“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” (Herman Melville)
“A good map is both a useful tool and a magic carpet to far away places." (unknown)
As I already commented on dA: Excellent work, subtile and eyecatching variation of the colours!
Beautiful map torstan, love the colors (and the idea) - one just wanna "dive in" and aborb the details...
see - no bugging about some element at all.. I can only say...
Well done
Absolutely stunning
Transcends time
Elegant
Really good work
regs tilt
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Top-notch, bro. One of the best maps (and cities) that I've ever seen.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
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