Ethran: Merelan City

[Mouse]

Thanks Straf

I'm thinking of using all six textures mixed together - the lower sections of the city would be built with the heavier tiles, whereas the higher regions might be more commonly built with the lighter weight slate. Both these things having been imported from other locales.

I think using a mixture would make the city look more natural, even though I will in effect have to make 6 new symbol sets, rather than just 1. Once I have drawn all the houses I will need in CorelDraw, I can then just swap the fills and render 6 images from each drawing

And I like the blue slate as well - just perhaps a tad darker and a tad more defined.


EDIT: Or have I got that the wrong way around? Which is heavier and more difficult to get up the cliffs? Is it slate, or tile?

[Straf]

I think tiles are heavier than slate. Clay tiles used to be used as ballast when the grain ships came back from the continent. Curled Dutch tiles are a familiar site all across East Anglia because of this.

[Mouse]

Oh! Now that is interesting...

I'm happy now. What you've just said means that I can do what I was thinking of doing, and sprinkle the warm tile colours around in the deeper greens of the lower slopes near the blue green of the ocean, while the colder blues of the slate will contrast equally well with the paler, more yellow grass of the upper slopes

I can see me carrying on with this all through the night now. (I get a bit carried away when I'm eager to see a result) Thanks Straf

[Mouse]

These are the updated slate textures:

[Straf]

They all look good but I still prefer the blue ones followed by the pink ones. The slate textures add a nice touch to the roofs.

[Mouse]

I have hit a dilemma!

I was making myself a nice set of building blocks, so that I could design buildings 'on site'... you know the sort of thing - basic rectangular building shapes, angles and joints...



I was drawing them as individual pieces on a CC3 map base and shading them by means of turning them into shaded polygons (giving them a pitch so that they catch the global sun or take a shadow). As I worked I started to realise just how many symbols I was going to have to make - 6 textures means six variations on each part... plus I tried building something with my bits and pieces, and it turns out that I'm a useless architect!!!

So I have decided that since I do need to make a new symbol set one way or another, I will use my 6 new textures to generate a new housing set based on the floor plans of the existing houses so that I don't have to re-draw the entire city all over again with different shaped buildings.

This could take a couple of days to get sorted!

[Mouse]

Well... I've made a start on the new house set, and this comment is more for people who want to know how its done.

Each house has four parts (from my point of view and using my method)

First I make a vector drawing of the house on a nice black background, using appropriate fills. (I'm using CorelDraw here - a very old version of it) I copy it and convert the copy into a bitmap, keeping the vector original to use in generating the other 3 parts of the house.



Then I use the shaping tool to subtract the parts of the house from the background to make a black and white alpha mask



The pitch of the roof requires what we call a 'map' which works along similar lines to a normal map, only its not a normal map (yes, confusing I know, but the colours CC3 uses to define direction and pitch are I believe different to those of a true normal map). I use only the tile shapes to generate the map because I don't want the coping stones to be shaded one way or the other.



Although it won't be visible, the map also requires an alpha mask, which you will see excludes the line of coping stones along the ridge of the roof.



Believe it or not, when I put all these bitmaps and masks together and set them up in CC3 they will paste into the map already shaded according to the global sun, in exactly the same way as the predefined CD3 building sets do. This is how far I am in the process of generating 40 different house shapes - each of them in 6 different colours...



As you can see, the smallest of the set has already taken me a day to get right, but its been a day of intensive learning. The rest should be relatively easy (I hope)

[Voolf]

Mouse i don't have time to follow this thread closely, i just skim the most interesting points and wanted to say that this project is awesome. You put such much work to it and so many details. It is a slow, but steady progress. I love your map. It is good you are working on new rooftop textures. Previous are not looking good, like a rock or something when you zoom out.

[Mouse]

Thanks Voolf

LOL! It is a very loooooooong thread, that's for sure! I never intended to take quite so long sorting this out - it just happened that way.

We are, surprisingly, quite close to the end now, but I think I will ask for an exception to the rule of sending people to the WIP thread when I put the city up in Finished Maps!

Maybe it would be better if I just included about ten images of the key stages of development in the Finished Maps thread, since I don't think I could be bothered reading the whole thing myself, and its my thread! LOL!

Don't know what I'll do yet.

In the meantime here are the first 6 tiny new symbols in use in part of the map itself. Though they will look a bit like coloured blocks as you zoom out, at least they can't really be called spotty