Ethran: Merelan City

[Mouse]

Version 50 - Trees... again.

Well... They look wonderful close up on the screen as I work:

Tree Sample.JPG

But rendered out they are, as you can see, completely OTT. I think I have to worry about scale issues of a different kind right now. The brighter points on each tree are coalescing during post processing to make them practically luminous. I just hope I don't end up having to re-render all 160 of them to put everything straight.

V50 3000.JPG

[Voolf]

The green trees looks very good imo, but some of the orange/red ones have to vivid colours to me, like colour burn layer has been used here. I would reduce saturation of those trees a bit down (if that's possible without rendering again in the software you are using).

[Mouse]

Thanks Voolf

I was quite pleased with the green ones myself, but thanks for noting them.

I think that if I am being honest with myself I already knew the orange and red ones were a problem, but just wanted to check before I start messing with them again.

Sine I made that comment about having to re-render them from Vue (when I was tired and not thinking straight), I realise now that all I really have to do is re-open each of the offending trees in Photopaint and, as you say, reduce the saturation. It will actually be more tricky to replace the bright ones with the dull ones I create because there are so very many of them all mixed up together now, but all told it shouldn't really set me back more than a day or two

Thanks for your help

[Mouse]

To answer the question of map scale:

This is a CC3+ map, which means it has no set scale other than the standard map units that define the size of the drawing and the relative default size of the symbols. There are no physical size limits such as you would find with a bitmap image to worry about (other than when setting up the bitmap texture fills) because as a FastCAD vector drawing the map as a whole can be enlarged to any resolution. The only limitation lies in the presence of the aforesaid bitmap texture fills, which will of course pixelate if you try to stretch it too big.

Having said that, I have inadvertently set the scale by making a decision about how big to paste my houses and trees into the map, so it is on these features that I must now base the scale.

This particular map is 5000 x 5000 map units. Using the distance measuring tool I have ascertained that the biggest trees (which should be no more than about 50ft across if this was a real location) are by some happy coincidence almost exactly 50 map units across. This gives me an approximate figure of 1 map unit per foot, and means the entire map is only 5000ft x 5000ft. Relatively small for a 'city'. However, we are talking about a way of life that approximates to the middle ages, so I think I can still call it a city, rather than a town. It is, after all, the largest single settlement on Ethran.

Now to convert feet to metres, which I prefer to work with.

5000ft = 1524m, so a scale bar that is 100m should be 5000/1524 x 100 map units

Knowing this, I can now set up an invisible snap grid and draw a nice scale bar... if I can find a suitable space!

Please let me know if you think there might be a fault with my calculations

[Mouse]

Version 51 - scale bar and compass

There are very few differences here, except that I have placed a scale bar and a compass from the old CC3 symbol set, and adjusted the position of the title to accommodate them.

I also found a quick way to get rid of the worst of the bright red and bright yellow trees, which involved swapping symbol definitions (replacing all the bright red and yellow trees with other less violently colourful members of the same symbol set). I'm not completely satisfied with the end result, but I need to let them be while I sort out the last element to be added - the tents

V51.JPG

[Falconius]

Looks great. The scale looks good too, and well within reason. Are those bare trees on top of the plateau there? I'm assuming they are, but they did look like craters or cracks in the earth at first, from what I assumed was some sort of war training going on up there.

[Mouse]

Thanks Falconius

I'm not great with numbers, but I worked hard to make sure that the scale is at least approximately accurate.

LOL! Those are indeed dead trees on top of the island, and its more a case of the drought killing them off than any war games (sorry to disappoint). I may need to make the transition a bit clearer by adding a few half living ones. I'll come back to them when I've done the tents in the salt marsh area.

EDIT: Personally, I think they do a really good impression of squashed giant ants!

[Straf]

Crikey! You've been busy.

I haven't seen this before and I'm afraid at 32 pages it's a bit tl;dr for me to follow. I particularly like the way you've done the lynchets. I'm assuming the people occupying the buildings at the bottom are poorer than those at the top as they'll get all of their runoff. However they'll be a lot closer to the delicious, salty samphire

Well done


EDIT: Ooh, I do believe this was my 100th post.

[Mouse]

Hey Straf

Thanks, and welcome to Merelan City!

This is the main setting for much of the first book of the Chronicles of Errispa series I'm trying to write, although there will be excursions to many other parts of Ethran before the story is done. I won't bore you with all the details here, now that we are so close to the end of the WIP thread, but those lynchets are the result of my best attempt to generate relief in a CC3 map, where the drawing is usually done with filled polygons and pasted symbols, rather than ink and lines.

I say usually, but I have been known to break the rules a bit in some of my more recent maps

Did you know that this entire thread is only 8 pages long if you adjust your settings in your profile settings page so that you can view more comments on each page?

[Straf]

Yes but if I see a page of 40 posts I'll freak even more Besides having more posts on a page makes the server do more work which means that there's an increase in electricity consumption requiring more fossil fuels to be shovelled into a furnace or more isotopes decaying creating environmentally damaging by products.

So by being too lazy to read this whole thread I am, in fact, saving the world.