Building Avencourt

Well, I’m still working on this map and finally making some real progress towards a completed draft. The image above is a top-down parallel projection view from within SketchUp, with all the buildings redrawn to fit within the new walls & towers layout. I increased the size of the Royal Palace and the walls around it (on the inside of the town), and I drew in entirely new building footprint shapes within the Royal Palace district itself, for the most part. At the moment, the only thing missing is the Tartarus Prison (other than the terrain, which I’ll be adding in by hand during the final pass). I’ve been having some trouble placing it just right in Sketchup, and since most of the prison itself is actually underground, I think I may just set it up once I get the map into Photoshop for tweaking.

I still plan on printing out the map and tracing over it by hand in pen to get the best hand-drawn quality for the lines. Below is an idea of the town in parallel projection (again, just a SketchUp screenshot):

The colors in both these images are just part of the SkU style I selected to make the images more readable. The final colors will be more in keeping with the 17th century style of the maps referenced by the client.

 

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 …

 

Eventful Summer

Of a sort, really. Although I confess I don’t have much in the way of artistic or cartographic updates, this is primarily because I spent the summer looking for a job. I suppose I’ll finally have to accept that a bachelor’s, especially in English, really isn’t enough any more. At least not for any of the work I’d like to do long-term.

Anyway, I am still working on 2 commissions I received way back in late April/early May from 2 wonderfully understanding people, and I do have a rough map for one of those ready to share.

This is a top-down view of the buildings as laid out in Google SketchUp 8 over top of a rough sketch the client sent. The Royal Palace (which was described as being similar to the inner bailey of a castle) is missing, as is the prison gatehouse near the center of the map. I’m not sure how to create the correct terrain for this map in SketchUp, but since the final map style is supposed to be sort of 17th century aerial/bird’s eye view I’m actually thinking of just pulling the buildings up to get the vertical lines, setting the camera to parallel projection, and then printing out a screenshot to ‘trace’ over.

The other map commission I’m working on, the client has requested I use CC3; at the moment, I don’t have any exported images to put here, but I’m planning on having something up sometime this weekend. I’m currently working on placing the terrain symbols, working north to south (and roughly east to west).

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Finally, I’m also working on a map for a friend’s Warhammer 40k game. The maps can be found HERE; I’ll be uploading updates as I complete them, probably once a week or so for a while since they’re playing Saturdays.