[WIP] Unnamed City

[Daelin]

Okay, so, the title of this thread might be something of a misnomer. For a work to be in-progress requires that it is still in fact being worked on. And, well, I'm fairly convinced that this map will not see any further development.

You see, one of my biggest weaknesses, when it comes to cartography, is limiting myself.
I have made unreasonably large maps in the past. My Empire of Humankind comes to mind. That map took me weeks of detailing, and it just wouldn't end because I kept adding more planets. I had, and still do have trouble just saying "nope, no more."

And thus this map. This is a city map, but could quite possibly end up being a regional map in city scale, if I keep working on it. To illustrate: just to get this map down to upload-able size, I've had to crop the surrounding away; the current map dimensions are actually 6000 x 8000 pixels. Yeah.

Getting to this WIP version has taken me maybe 25-30 hours. And I'd venture that the map is about 5-10% done by now. So, with a bit of math, this map with probably, at the current speed, take me 150 to 200 hours to complete - and that's a conservative estimate.
And so, I am for all intents and purposes calling it quits on this map. Have you ever stood before a task that just seemed so massive or complex that you didn't even know where to begin? Well, that's how I feel about this map right now. The sheer scale that this behemoth has grown into has wreaked havoc upon my work process. I can't even.

But, I also don't want this map to languish forever in my work folder, unseen by any eyes other than mine. So here it is.
It's a city map.

[Falconius]

Definitely cool, so it's a shame you aren't planning on continuing it. How'd you do the beveling and dormers and stuff? Especially on the more complex roofs?

[Daelin]

How'd you do the beveling and dormers and stuff?

Well, that's a large part of why this map has taken so long. By painful trial and error with Photoshop's shape tool. Rotating, resizing, often moving one pixel at a time to make them align as I want. I suspect using vector graphics might ease the process somewhat, but then I'd have to learn a whole new program, and, eh...