Mapping the City of Tien: A palimpsest of culture and process

Today's topic: the city of Tien. Tien is the capital city in the Kingdom of Zhan - a whirling nest of high court intrigue, magic, assassins, and the occasional undead. You can read about it in the amazing Kelly McCullough's new book, which I blogged about mapping yesterday, too.

I want to point out my process for making the city map. My goal was less about topography and more about neighborhoods. Where is the Stumbles? How close is it to the Royal Docks? Where is the Ismere library in relationship to the Royal Palace and the River Zien? How do the canals provide transportation and sewer service?

And, summarily, how would all of this have accreted over the centuries as new places sprung up, old ones decayed or gentrified, and more and more people tried to use the space?

While I'm not a geographer, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about how people interact with the landscape. Starting from a scanned sketch from Kelly, I knew where the major features were. In this case, I had to do less geologic creation, and more urban planning. I did know that there were four major hills - kind of like the seven hills of Rome. So my first thought was to figure out how those hills got there - this would give me geologic constraints on the locations of various streets and neighborhoods. Plus, I would illustrate the general topography and keep the detail for specific places and buildings named in the book. Since we had a river that flowed into the harbor, my first thought was to have the four hills as remnant high stream terraces, with the majority of the city built around the (heavily modified) floodplain or low terraces. But there were some plot devices used in the book that needed good bedrock cliffs. So I adjusted my terrace idea to be remnant bedrock highs, surrounded by the lower floodplain. Plus a remnant terrace on which to place the Royal Palace and a few other neighborhoods - these breaks in the flat-lying landscape often create neighborhoods in real cities (especially ones along rivers).


Here was my first pass at organizing the city landscape. I ended up symbolizing the hilly areas differently, but it gave me the layout of the major features.


Now came filling in the neighborhoods and implying that most of the city was a dense maze of city blocks - it's a lot easier to erase away the streets to define the general pattern. I didn't intend to draw every single building - that way would lead to madness...

With much of the street layout defined, I started to place a few important buildings and work out how I was going to show the reader where the hills were located. It's tricky. Many maps use hachure lines to display topographic information. But this didn't mesh with the way I had drawn some of the other features, so I played around with some possibilities. Besides - some of these hills were really steep bedrock cliffs, while others were just rounded and steeper than the surrounding plain.

This was too "smeared" and I also didn't think it would reproduce well as a halftone bitmapped image.


This was better - plus, I could show the ruggedness of the slopes.


So here's the city with the four major hills and the streets. I adjusted the canals so they would at least seem to have the potential to act as both a sewer and transportation system.

Tossing in some text, a few important buildings and a rough scale, here's the finished map.


Keep in mind that this map was being printed only 3" wide, so I gave prime location to the names, rather than specific features. A few tweaks to the final halftone so the grays would reproduce well and it went with it's sibling world map to the publisher. And now it's in print. That makes me happy. So go buy the book already!

Making a Map

Guess what? Today is the release date for Broken Blade, a new fantasy series written by my good pal Kelly McCullough. Having read the beta versions, I can say that if you enjoy fantasy novels and film noir, you'll enjoy these books.

Beyond reading the beta copy, I drew the maps used in the book. It's partly an homage to the maps in Tolkein's Hobbit and LOTR, but it's also done from the perspective of 1) A geologist who understands some aspects of how the geography of a region might evolve as a result of some underlying physical process and 2) a traveler or map-maker living in this fictional world, trying to convey what it's like to "be there."

I started with a fairly simple sketch map that Kelly drew up as he was outlining the story. From this, I drew a pencil & pen sketch of how I thought it should look. I scanned this map into the computer so I could adjust things in Photoshop - it's much easier to add text, move mountains (literally), and prep the map for publication as a digital image. Several years ago, I drew a map for a friend, and I had done everything in layers of tracing paper so I could adjust rivers, forests, etc. I much prefer the digital method.


Here's a scan of part of my pen/pencil sketch. I also worked on a map of the principal city, which took Kelly's original sketch and went straight into the computer.


Before going any further with line work, I wanted to make sure that I would draw mountains, hills, and rivers that behaved in a reasonable manner. In the real world, the geography is a function of climate, underlying bedrock, and elevation. I didn't have time to draw up a geologic map, but I had both likely climatic and geologic characteristics in my head when I sketched out a rough elevation map.


The rough elevation map: white=high elevation. This gave me a way to keep things organized - where the mountains should be, where rivers and lakes should be (so I wouldn't draw rivers that had to flow uphill)


Here's a detail that shows how I combined representations of mountains (in a semi-oblique view) with rivers.


And the finished geography portion of the map. I tailored the geomorphology to have some areas with fairly young, active topography, with areas of older, more mature topography.

Then there was the need to provide place names so that people reading the story could check the map to see where they were. I tried to keep large areas of negative space so that I could place text without having to contort it too much. But this is where digital map-making really helped - I could just select and drag an entire mountain or stretch of river and drag it out of the way to accommodate text. Or I could curve text, tighten the kerning or otherwise keep the text legible (although at published size, about 3" wide, nearsighted readers may have some difficulty).


And the finished project, complete with labels. And in print, it looks even cooler (since there's an awesome story that unfolds around it).

So go get a copy!

Ben - here you go:

I got mine!

Are you going to get yours?

Holiday Decorations

I put up some holiday decorations today. Although I may have gotten things turned around a little bit.

Toy for Bloggers?

Got a blogger in your life? Want to get them something new and fancy? Are you a blogger? Looking to see if the shiny iPad 2 does everything you need?

I don't have one, but my mom ended up getting one, so I spent some time yesterday checking out how easy it would be to use it as a Thurs-Demo tool. I did two tests. The first was pulling a full-size HD movie off my Canon 7D and processing it with the iPad. The second was a video shot with the iPad's video camera. Both of these were done with iMovie and were remarkably quick to make. The slowest part is the USB link between iPad and camera.





I would venture to say that the video quality off the iPad isn't bad. In places with lots of light, it's pretty clear and sharp. But in lower-light locations (indoors with curtains drawn), it's a bit grainy. And the resolution of the video is sufficient, but not so high resolution as to track individual drops of water or grains of sand...

I thought some of you might be interested - I know the most interesting thing about the iPad2 for me is the enhanced video capability. It's not something that would replace the high-end video capability I have with my Canon 7D and computer, but it would shorten the time required for some of the video work and it does create possibilities where none existed before.

Dune Week

Looks like folks are talking about sand dunes and eolian transport on the geoblogs this week.

Here's some video I shot of blowing sand - you can see at least two distinct modes of movement - large grains are either tumbling individually, or avalanching down the slip face. Smaller grains, however, are picked up by the wind and bouncing (saltating) as they are transported.