Okay, this has been a while! Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, Narolas, I totally lost track of this thread while working on my Viridia map, but now that's done (and while I'm waiting for some input from another client) I decided to give this one a long overdue touch of attention. But first, question time!
For the dropshadows of the buildings I basically coloured in the roofs, selected all the coloured pixels from that layer (in Photoshop that's by Ctrl-clicking the layer), moved that selection x pixels down and to the right and then bucket filled it with black. Then I went back to the roof colour layer, Ctrl-clicked it again (again selecting the total footprint of the roofs), selected my shading layer again and clicked delete. That made sure there would only be shadows where there weren't roofs. then all I had to do was draw diagonal lines between the roof corners and the shadow corners and fill in the triangles. Actually it's a bit more elaborate than that but that's the general gist.Originally Posted by Narolas
Also, I hand-selected a few buildings (using the lasso tool) and did the same trick, but moving the shadows a few dozen pixels more down and to the right. These would be taller buildings like towers, and large halls.
Getting the shadows right on the roofs themselves was an entirely different problem, and I mostly eyeballed those, with a lot of trial and error to be sure!
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Alright, another update I said, and here it is. You'll notice I worked on the roof detail a bit more (slowly creeping northward with my dashes, but I also added a pattern to them that should help convey "this is actual terracotta!" a little better). I also threw in some cobbles in the streets, splashed some green muck on them and a bit of dirt in the corners. Not finished yet, but slowly getting there!
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