Avencourt: Details

With a few minor (easy) fixes and of course the addition of several key buildings, this map is quickly nearing a finish. Using an early version of the map (before I pulled all the buildings up and added roofs, and without some small fixes to positioning/sizing), I’m rebuilding the map essentially from scratch. This is just so I can add details, which you can see in the walls and towers. I’m not trying to be incredibly accurate with this details, and won’t be adding anything more “extravagant” than what I’ve got here simply because the map is supposed to be in a hand-drawn, hand-inked, 17th-century aerial perspective style. Having said that, I went into the first version knowing I was going to be rebuilding everything; I really wanted to make sure I had the scale looking alright, and I needed a 3D map to work out the line/edge and shading styles.

Hopefully I’ll have a few different buildings to post in the next day or so; I’ll be making about 3-5 different buildings for each section of the city, which I’ll then duplicate and make minor modifications to in order to fill in the town.

Key buildings, such as the Opera House, Tartarus Prison, Glandem House, and the Royal Palace will, of course, be modeling as one-offs.

 

Therafim Update

*NOTE: THIS IMAGE FILE IS EXTREMELY LARGE*
(I’ve posted such a large image file in order to send the highest resolution file I have to the commissioner.)

This is another map commission I took several months ago that has, unfortunately, taken far too long to really get underway. This is, in part, due to my lack of experience with CC3 (Campaign Cartographer 3), and partly due to my regular inability to overcome any failure I experience when using the program. It’s also frustrating that I have to place symbols “front to back” and it’s exceptionally difficult to select and send anything behind something else; there isn’t even an option to bring something forward! The lack of (good) documentation is also a serious problem for me, although the video tutorials on YouTube have been pretty helpful.

Setting aside that little rant, I have, fortunately, managed to reach a point where work on this map is going fairly smoothly, if a little slowly. In the interest of ensuring nothing is just slap-dash-edly placed in an effort to get things down “somewhere”, I confess to spending a fair amount of time laying down symbols and then deleting all or most and starting over again once I get the general layout and placement the way I want it.

So far no labels, but the entire northern ‘pole’ (“Rimevast”) is complete, and as you can see I’ve added in a single city on the northeastern-most continent (“Autumn Land”); it’s supposed to be due south from the city just north on Rimevast, so I thought I’d drop it in now.

Next step is Autumn Land, followed by … whatever continent/landmass I take a shine to after that. Labels will be added last since most of them are actually fairly easy to remember.

 

Avencourt Update

Added a few roofs I seem to have forgotten in the Royal Palace district (only district with blue roofs in this update). Also redid the line appearance, layering several images of the map with a different edge style set each time in SketchUp before capturing a screenshot. The resolution is far too low at the moment (only 72 dpi), but I wanted to get an idea of some of the colors I’ll be using, and what brush settings would work to give that “hand-painted in water-color/water-thinned ink” look. I do have a tablet, so the hand-painting part is literal, but I wanted to figure out how I’d like to achieve a good ‘paint over’ effect.

I think this is looking fairly good right now, although I see a few places I need to correct some lines, and I still need to add in the Royal Palace in the north-east corner, the old quarry Basse Mont near the center of map, with Tartarus Prison down in Basse Mont and the Piazza dei Gatti near that free-standing brown-roofed warehouse building. A few other details (like the gates, of course), and some indication of the terrain along the south, and with an increase in image quality to about 300 dpi, I should be finishing this map up.

Now I just need to figure out how to save out a high-quality map from Campaign Cartographer 3, which I should have bothered to figure out awhile ago …