Two Month Summer Challenge entry 2017: "O'Gray's Pearls - Nexus City"

[Mouse]

Hi Everyone

Ok - I said I would wait for everyone else to get their challenge entries up here in the Finished Maps forum, but I thought again and realised that was a kind of bullying (I'm sorry - my bad! I didn't mean it that way). So I posted mine today so there's no pressure on anyone else to do likewise - though it would be fantastic if all the many and beautiful maps from this special challenge appeared together

Here is my entry for the recent 2 month summer special challenge. The theme was to pick and mix from two lists of previous challenge themes - two themes from the list of Main Challenge Themes, and one theme from the list of Lite Challenge Themes.

Many thanks to Straf for making the suggestion and to Diamond for masterminding the finer details.

The themes I picked were to draw a map from a set urban map (contained within the layout of Nexus City), to draw a map of a portal trap (these pearls are portal traps), and Fun with Isometric Mapping (The entire map is isometric)

I had a whole load of fun along with the trials and tribulations of the challenge, and would like to thank all the people who commented on my thread and helped me with all their suggestions and encouragement, and I would also like to thank all the people who variously voted, repped and praised me.

*** Thank you guys ***



For the studious types who don't mind reading several pages of comments, here is the WIP thread.

A summary of how it was done:

I worked mainly in GIMP for this map. The city buildings were drawn in Sketchup and exported in a series of files (shading, texture and 'building mask') to GIMP, where they were re-assembled and processed to optimise the surprisingly not very good shading you get with Sketchup, using a technique that Francissimo taught me, and which I think he should name. Nexus was 'built' on top of a texture painted landscape done entirely in GIMP and utilising fills that I made myself with Genetica, mixed with a couple of fills I downloaded from Textures.com and modified (non-seamless forest views to seamless textures for example), again using Genetica to modify them. Unfortunately because they are modified Textures.com textures I cannot share them with you like I do my own homemade fills, as that would break the Terms and Conditions of use.

The pearls (you can call them bubbles if you want ) were created in Blender. They're simple spheres with a rather special material applied to them, using Fresnel shading (where a transparent surface becomes opaque at an oblique angle). There are a few specimens in my free textures album linked below in my signature if you would like to use them in maps of your own.

Mesa, and Dragon Rock were Vue terrains. I used what are called 'procedural' terrains (ie ones that are built by a fractal function), modified them with a bit of hand sculpting, and then created the textures I wanted for the map. The little water filled pearl is the only remnant of a set of 14 other pearls that I didn't have time to complete, but which I intend to add to a larger version of this same map when time permits. Its name is 'Orca'. That was a Vue ocean rendering, which I think I could possibly do better by hand in GIMP, but that's for the future

If you have any questions please don't be afraid to ask. It was a complicated process to make this map, and I have probably forgotten to mention quite a lot of things here.

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Footnote: Please remember that this is my map, and if you decide to pin it you should also credit me, Sue Daniel, as its author and the owner of the copyright, and cite Cartographer's Guild as the home location of the map. Thank you

Rights to display and use this map for the promotion of Cartographer's Guild are automatically granted to site owners, Administrators and our Community Leaders at their discretion.

[QED42]

Super impressive map, great concept that turned out really well. I especially like the trees even if they are a more "mundane" part of the over all piece.

[Mouse]

Thank you, QED

funnily enough, the trees were my favourite part. All the rest of it was really pushing my limits as far as skills and abilities went, but the trees were just a couple of texture painted layers where all I had to do was dab them into existence. The hardest part was doing the shading - that bit I very nearly forgot, but which Francissimo kindly reminded me of in the last couple of days.

If you are looking to do something similar in GIMP, all you need is a seamless tree texture (there are a few you could use at Textures.com without the need to modify and make your own as I did), turn it into a pattern fill, fill a complete layer with it and add a layer mask - black for full transparency - then paint on the layer mask in white to reveal the bits that you want. Shading is added using a second transparent layer over the top of the trees, turning its blend mode to overlay, or multiply (you will have to reduce the opacity if you use multiply), and drawing the shade with a soft brush in black, or some similar dark colour.

Its the shading that makes it pop

In CC3 you would need to obtain a forest fill, or download one from Textures.com and turn it into a png file before adding it to your user bitmap fills folder with the rest of the CC3 bitmaps. Then you would have to use 'import fills' to make the texture available for use on your map, but once you have done that you can just draw the shapes of the forest as polygons with the freehand drawing tool (close the shapes to form polygons by right clicking the Fractalize tool and choosing 'path to poly').

Shading would be a bit different. You would have to add a new sheet above the one with the forests on it and draw solid black polygons on that where the shading should be, then add a small Blur sheet effect to take out any sharp edges, followed by a Blend Mode effect set to either overlay or multiply. Editing would be a lot more fiddly because you would be working with polygons rather than painting or erasing black paint like the GIMP users, but its not impossible

Note - make sure you get your sheet effects the right way around on the shading sheet - Blur, then Blend Mode. If you blend before you blur everything inside the shadow will be just as blurred as the shadow.

[LordEntrails]

Great map, truly impressive setting/concept. I'm already wondering if I might use a similar concept with islands in a fantasy setting...

Thanks for pointing me to this thread and bummed I missed it when it came out.

[Mouse]

Thank you LE

And thank you also for the rep - its much appreciated

If you want to go for a similar effect, the bubbles I made for it are in my 'Free seamless textures' album (probably the wrong place, but hey...) linked in my signature below. They are transparent symbols you just paste over the top of whatever circular/spherical design you want to encase in a bubble.