City of Aktat - WIP thread

[Turambar]

Recently I have been working on a refining a new style for city maps, most recently for my Valam commission (see WIP thread here). I decided to make my next city map for a personal project. This will bit larger scale, so hopefully it will end looking ok, but I really wanted to show land surrounding the city including neighboring villages and farms. In any case, here's the first WIP entry for the map of the city of Aktat, the capital of the semiautonomous state of Ralpecash.

I started as usually do, with the basic base terrain, as terrain will largely influence urban development as well as placement of roads, villages, etc. I created the base heightmap and texture using Gaea, and pulling into Gimp for editing. The rest of the map will be entirely painted in GIMP.



Next up, I have roughly sketch out the locations on the map as well as the rivers and streams. Solid red is water, the old city is transparent red the new city is blue (darker blue is the rough location of where the docks will be), and green represents shantytowns and villages.



Finally, where I am currently at, is drawing the road network. I have spent quite a bit of time reading up on how road networks develop and I tried my best to make this as accurate as possible. however, please let me know where you may see anything that could use improvement, as I'm sure it is imperfect. I am hoping to make edits to these outlines before diving into painting the map in detail.