Opinions on my cartography

Attached (hopefully) is a gif screen capture I did after I finished some cartography and an isometric illustration. Anyone out there who can help me add textures and some more shadows to this illustration? Also, would it look better with if it were "grounded" with some dirt and grass?


Eric

Yeah, I think it would look a bit better if you put some ground fading away around the house.

Though as it is, it looks great.

Very nice. I agree that adding some land around the building would "anchor" the building a bit.

What software did you use to create this? And was it hard to learn?

I made the drawings in Autocad, though I expect any CAD package would be comparable. I didn't find it hard to learn at all, but YMMV. While Autocad is way beyond what anyone not in the business would probably buy, ACad Light and other CAD packages are very reasonable. I think there are even some free Cad packages around... Once i had the basic drawing done I exported the line art as a wmf and then opened it with Paint Shop Pro, enlarging it as I went. Then it was just a matter of coloring it. Most of that is flood fill but some painstaking little dots had to be touched up one at a time... Once the art was done I saved them as tiff files and then pasted them into a publisher layout and added the text. Then I pdf'd it with Acrobat, though pdf995 is a good solution for those on a budget.

I finished that whole process in a single afternoon.

For textures, the EN World hosted Crooked Staff Productions has a high-resolution tile set (200 pixels per 5' square) that's freely downloadable.

Here's my own recent creation using those, plus a bunch of stuff I nicked from other places, and a lot of hand-tweaking. It's a tavern for the "Mor's End" EN World city project over in Plots & Places: