[CC3] Emulating 18th and 19th Century City Street Maps

[jaerdaph]

I'm trying to emulate 18th and 19th century street maps using Campaign Cartographer 3 from Profantasy. My ultimate goal is to be able to produce something like Greenwood's 1827 Map of London. I'm using Greenwood's map as my inspiration, and the following image from a site about Abbey Green in Bath:

Here's my first attempt at a section of a fictional city using CC3 with the City Designer 2 compatability update:

All the buildings (except for the church which is a CC3 vector symbol) are polygons with various halftone shading fills. By placing those on the Structures sheet, I was able to take advantage of CC3's effects and add a slight drop shadow.

The TrueType font I'm using is Dominican - I was going for a "New World" sort of feel here. If anybody can suggest any TrueType fonts (preferably freeware/shareware) similar to the ones in my inspiration examples above for a more "Old World" feel, I'd greatly appreciate it.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions or has tried something similar themselves, I would love to hear about it!

Thanks in advance.

 

[D'karr]

I like it.

Only two suggestions. I'd make the drop-shadow more pronounced and bring it in tighter around the buildings. I'd also either trace the church and make it into a polygon or explode the symbol and do the same. Place it into the structures sheet to get the same drop shadow effect.

I like the font a lot. It gives the maps character.

Very well done.

 

[jaerdaph]

Thanks I've tightened up the drop shadow and added a drop shadow to the church symbol by applying the same settings to the Symbols sheet. I had to refresh this page a few times then empty my temporary internet files for the new image to show up above though -weird.

Right now I'm working on water features for street level city maps - lakes, ponds, streams etc. I'll post an image of what I'm shooting for and my CC3 experimentation later.

 

[jaerdaph]

So, I've come up with something for a park area:

I was debating whether I wanted to keep to black and white or add a handful of colors. I think I'm going to go with four basic colors - black, green, blue and red.

For the green parkland and blue pond, I used a fill style called Gray 2, which has an "antique" feel to it with the dots making a color appear lighter. I used the inner glow effect on the pond, but no effects on the parkland. The buildings are CC3 vector symbols, again with the drop shadow effect mentioned above.

Again, this is a fictional park. What I'm doing is developing styles and techniques to replicate the look of 18th and 19th century maps in CC3, and will eventually use these for a larger project.

 

[Pbartender]

If anyone has any comments or suggestions or has tried something similar themselves, I would love to hear about it!

Here's a overview city map for an Iron Heroes campaign I made recently...

...I was aiming for the same sort of "woodcut" or ink-print style.

For the roads, I just started with a white background in Photoshop, then added in a second a second layer on which I drew the streets as black lines. I "stroked" the street layer with one pixel worth of white on the outside, and the inverted the colors. That left me with white streets outlined in black... or black outlined white city locks that defined the streets.

The font is called "Windlass", but isn't free.

The trees in the swamp and the cliff-face I borrowed from scans of old real-world maps of the appropriate era.

The shore line of the river was stolen from Google Maps, and the water shading was done by "stroking" again with alternating 1 pixel wide white and black lines -- blend mode "dissolve", white always 100% opacity, black beginning at 100% opacity and reducing the opacity by 5% each time thereafter.

It was first trying this sort of style, and I got a few ideas for improving my techique for next time.

 

[jaerdaph]

Wow, that's a beautiful map! The style reminds me of a reprint of an 1855 New York City map poster I recently purchased from Browne and Company down at South Street Seaport (which has been an inspiration in this project for me as well). The river shading is exactly what I want to do with my maps - I'm still trying to see if there is an easy way to emulate that with CC3.

Your map also demonstrates how streets can be drawn out as entities themselves, as opposed to allowing the buildings and blocks to define the streets as I'm doing. Both types of map were produced during the period.

The trees in the swamp and the cliff-face I borrowed from scans of old real-world maps of the appropriate era.

Now that CC3 lets you use raster images more effectively, I have to remember that.

Thanks for sharing that - very cool!

 

[Hjorimir]

Here's a overview city map for an Iron Heroes campaign I made recently...

Any chance you'd do a step-by-step tutorial for those of us who have photoshop but no idea how to use it? I'm loving that map.

 

[Jraynack]

Good solid maps! I would suggest converting the entire maps to sepia tone to further give it that old feel.

 

[-SIN-]

Any chance you'd do a step-by-step tutorial for those of us who have photoshop but no idea how to use it? I'm loving that map.

SECONDED!

 

[Pbartender]

Any chance you'd do a step-by-step tutorial for those of us who have photoshop but no idea how to use it? I'm loving that map.

SECONDED!

I'll try to remember, as soon as I guess a chance.