Ostwyc, the Lion City

[Caenwyr]

Oh hey all!

So while I'm waiting for my next commission to materialize (heh!), I decided to map another important city in my own fantasy universe. This one is called Ostwyc, the Lion City.

Ostwyc is a really old city, one of the first there ever were actually. Villages were still a new and exciting concept in most of the world when the first stone was laid for Ostwyc's first citadel. This seed of the city was planted in a narrow valley overlooking the East Cilydd plains, an easily defensible position. The city gradually overgrew its walls and spread out along both sides of a long, narrow lake. The entrance to the valley is guarded by a large hill, more like a granite fist pushing up from the valley floor. A fortress was built on top and two walls were strung between either side of the valley and the walls of the fortress, with massive fortifications ensuring the safety of the city. Over the centuries, Ostwyc has built and maintained a whole network of guard towers in the surrounding country side, both in the plains and the mountains that surround it. Each is fitted with a very well equipped garrison, excellently trained and always at the ready (although in the lasting peace of the past century they might have slackened off a bit... Oooh, do I sense a plot device?). Because of all these precautions, Cilydd has never had its walls broken during all the centuries of its existence, and it is probably the only city of a certain age that can claim so.

Despite its forbidding appearance from the outside, Ostwyc is actually a very pleasant city to live in. Most houses are pastel coloured and have real glass windows, the streets are clean, beggars are few and most seem actually pretty well-fed. There are parks strewn throughout the city, statues of old heroes, libraries, museums and temples, and entertainment for all layers of society. Small ferries move across the lake continuously, and at night, the thousands of lights from the city and the bobbing lanterns of the ferries create a starscape with no equal on the glittering surface of the lake.

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Alright, so much for the sales pitch. Describing the city is the easy part (mainly because I've madly fallen in love with it). The hard part will be turning it into a map that actually reflects what I just wrote - and more importantly, what I have in mind. The idea is to create the map in a style similar to what I did for another important city in the same universe: Ganador. I really like how that one turned out, but I'm afraid I have mostly forgotten how I got there, so it'll take quite some testing (and peeking at the old PSD-file) to get it right. If I ever do!

The hard part with this map, and something I didn't have to tackle with the coastal city of Ganador, is the terrain. Ganador is entirely level, built as it is on mud flats in the mouth of a river. Ostwyc on the other hand is surrounded by mountainous cliffs on two sides, and sports a huge block of a hill with a monumental fortress on top. It's sort of a mix of the Lauterbrunnen Valley in Switzerland and the fortress hill of Hochosterwitz in Austria. Yes, I've raised the bar impossibly high . Even if you forget all the other challenges for a moment, just getting across the terrain means I'll need to use a ton of shading. So... very gingerly I have started playing with Wilbur again, although the beast has taken the best of me several times before. If it doesn't work out how I want it, I'm gonna do it all by hand - probably the faster solution too knowing how much time I spend on Wilburring!


Okay! Let me show you guys what I got at the moment:

1. a sketch of what goes where:


2. a stepped terrain model, which is currently (and probably for some hours) undergoing a substantial Wilbur treatment:

[Falconius]

That stepped map is pretty cool in and of itself. Although I've always had problems with Wilbur when using stepped type height maps before as in it erodes them as steps. Did you blur it first (which is generally my solution)?

It's always interesting to see peoples planning stages, this should be fun to see develop.

[Caenwyr]

That stepped map is pretty cool in and of itself. Although I've always had problems with Wilbur when using stepped type height maps before as in it erodes them as steps. Did you blur it first (which is generally my solution)?

It's always interesting to see peoples planning stages, this should be fun to see develop.

I feel the same way! In a way their learning experience is also mine. I tend to read those kinds of posts with a lot of interest!

By the way, I'm not exactly a Wilbur expert. Which means I keep failing at it, and ultimately doing the thing by hand. And frankly, because of that glaring Wilbur disability I have developed quite a knack for it! Turn your weaknesses into your strengths, right? Also, I'm a control freak so having it all in hand is waaaay more satisfying to me.

So I went back to that stepped terrain thingy and redid most of it. In the original version the valley walls were sloped roughly at a 45° angle, while I actually wanted the valley floor to be fairly flat, and the walls to be pretty steep - a typical glacial valley with a lake at the bottom. I could have changed that by lowering the difference in brightness of the lower levels and upping it in the higher elevations, but that's just lazy people talk!

So this is what I have now:

It still lacks a few layer in the tops of the mountains (they currently look ridiculously flat), but that is in the process of getting tackled.

To give you a quick (and very ugly) impression of how the lighting of the place will turn out, here's a quick bump render:

(pure, and with some blurring)

[HughVoodoo]

This looks very promising. If you don't mind me asking, what programs are you using to complete these maps? Also, I looked through your portfolio on your website - beautiful work in there! Question, how do you create the buildings like in your Granador work? Do you draw them individually? Thanks!

[Caenwyr]

This looks very promising. If you don't mind me asking, what programs are you using to complete these maps? Also, I looked through your portfolio on your website - beautiful work in there! Question, how do you create the buildings like in your Granador work? Do you draw them individually? Thanks!

Hi there Hugh! Thanks for asking! And I'm glad you like my work! I usually use Photoshop exclusively for my mapping endeavours, and draw everything in there by hand, although I do play with a ton of masks, and make quite extensive use of shading and beveling "layer styles", as Photoshop calls them. If I recall correctly from my GIMP days, GIMP does not have these functions natively, but there are external scripts you can download to have similar effects - you should really try those out if you feel like mapping but don't like the idea of spending the dough on Photoshop.

So the buildings in my Ganador map were entirely handdrawn, but I gave them that 3D-ish look by using some drop shadow and bevel-and-emboss effects. Be sure to check out the WIP to get a detailed view of the process!

[Caenwyr]

Alright! And in the meantime I also have an update for you guys on the terrain front. So I went about and kept adding layers to the terrain, gradually climbing to the tops of the highest mountains. Never in my wildest imagination had I thought it would be such a crazy painstaking process!

I'm too fond of details to just do a half-assed job, but I do definitely realize how horribly I'm getting side tracked here. This is supposed to be about a city, and all I've done over the past 6 hours (only counting time actually spent on the map!) is add 5 more levels of silly detail, that will probably be blurred out again!

But still, it's a labour of love I guess. Because no matter how long it takes, I actually enjoy shaping and kneading those mountains just the way I want them.

So here's my progress! The greyscale DEM, currently counting 23 levels (I estimate I'll need at least 3 more to clear the highest peaks):

and two quick-n-dirty bump renders, one sharp and one blurred to oblivion:

Still some weird flatlands visible in the highest reaches... and still not a single house in sight

What I'm currently struggling with is, when I finally begin adding houses, whether I should actually add each individual house to the DEM itself as a tiny rectangle (with a greyscale level equivalent to say 5 meters and the layer set to "add"), which would cause houses on a slope to look slanted... or forget about that and just draw them in and bevel-and-emboss them like a maniac...

The first approach is by far the most consistent one, but man I hate consistency sometimes

[Caenwyr]

Alright, update for you people:

I ended up adding 5 more levels to the terrain before I got to the highest peaks, but the job is done! Now I can finally go on and map the city itself!

• The raw contour lines:
  
• the resulting bump map:
  
• And a bump map based on a slight "Wiburization of the contour lines map:
  

Which means I can finally start working on that damn city

[Falconius]

Yeah that looks really good. I feel like the Wilburization in the very photo is a bit too eroded, which I assume was done to try and get rid of the ledges. I like the fairly flat surface from the mountain bases and then that slightly sharp dip right in the center, and you loose it with the eroded version.

[Caenwyr]

Yeah that looks really good. I feel like the Wilburization in the very photo is a bit too eroded, which I assume was done to try and get rid of the ledges. I like the fairly flat surface from the mountain bases and then that slightly sharp dip right in the center, and you loose it with the eroded version.

You're definitely right Falconius! But the advantage of the eroded mountain sides is (at least to me) far more important than the fact that some other features have slunk away. I intend to bring back the mountainous cliffs once I get to shading, and the dip in the middle will become a long, narrow lake with its own very distinct colour gradient - and I'll largely use the (uneroded) depth contour lines from the original file for that.

Alright. So the past two hours I've been trying to bring the Lion's Rock to life - the solitary rocky hill that will eventually sport a large castle overlooking both the city and the riverlands to the south. Originally the highest peaks of that feature rose about 350 meters above the city. I broke most of those ridges down and filled the valleys in between to get to a flat surface now rising some 280 meters above the city. I then started constructing a road from the city floor all the way to the top, trying to keep the steepness below 15%. I can't say for sure I succeeded (I'm too lazy to go and check) but all in all it does look plausible. Hardest part was to draw the road exactly where the terrain would allow it, to prevent any rocky outcrops on the valley side of the road - it has no defensive use if it's surrounded by rock on two sides!

I then drew in both walls - the old one in the north, and the newer one in the south. The old one still needs some work.



to get an idea of the scale of the place:

• 1 pixel represents a horizontal distance of 1 meter, while
• a 1% increase in brightness (or in other words, 1% of 256 brightness levels) represents a height difference of 10 meters. I can go a teeny bit more detailed by using brightness levels instead (measured in 8 bit or 256 in total), resulting in roughly 4 meters per 1/256th. So basically a house of about 6 meters high would barely be visible on the terrain map, but if the edges are clear enough, it will still show on the bump map. Which in turn means i'll have to do a ton of crazy drawing-and-transferring.

I intend to use two ways to indicate height:

1. the bump map showing the dropshadow of each 3D feature (building, bridge, wall, mountain, ...), and
2. a layer with the rooftops in bright terracotta, with a bevel-and-emboss effect to have them poke out at the viewer.

[Falconius]

Very interesting approach. It also sounds super intensive