Here is my most recent work. It is of the old city of Jerusalem. I have yet to finish putting in houses, building the barracks and Solomon’s Temple.
I have also started a journal for this project:
http://www.3dm3.com/forum/journal.php?do=showjournal&j=2
here is another render.
C&C’s are welcome
i like it but i would make zoom in some more the show the finner details of the models them selfs and get a new skymap the one you have setup now is kinda streached and some bigger pics would be nice 
but i like the idea somthing thats never really model’d
here is another update…I added a lot more houses:
and about the picture size, I don’t know why it shows up so small on here. You can see some bigger pics on my other thread:
http://www.3dm3.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5508
Oh, the sky texture is big…I got it from here:
I just think that I might not have the right settings on. What would you suggest?
And another thing, if you can see it, the texture I made for the walls looks kind of stretch on some sections…any ideas for that?
opps…here’s the link where I got the sky:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24738
and here’s a close up of the wall…
ok well i am not really sure about ether of your questions i beleave your skymap is just maped in the wrong directions heres the image i made in about 2mins playing with it a few secants its not fabulus by no streatch and you can still see that its looks like its maped to the inside of a sphere but i have never been to great with skymaps and as for the wall streatching how did you make it is it a displacemnt map with a color map or did you model the briks or what?
the wall texture is just something that I came up with in Gimp…and then I used the “Nor” button in Blender to make it look 3D.
thats looking pritty good my question to you is do you no how nor and displaysment maps work???
no, I can’t say that I do know how they work…I just experiment, push buttons and then try to figure out what the buttons do…
tell me about nor. and disp.
now dont quote me on this but as far as i understand it a displacement map takes the grays blacks and whites of a picture and displaces the verts the black being the lowest point the white being the highest point and heres a link to info on nor maps http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Normal_Maps.491.0.html
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Displacement_mapping.37.0.html
and one for diplasment maps
thanks, I’ll read up on that…I should have a solution over the weekend
Both nor (or bump maps) and displacement maps are methods of increasing the apparent bumpiness of an object, without adding the burden of modelling such detail to the artist.
Nor maps do it by modifying the normal of a given pixel. Displacement maps modify the actual geometry of the object prior to rendering.
Nor maps are faster (mostly because you don’t have to take into consideration renderfaces), but are unable to obscure geometry… put one cheek up against a brick wall and look towards the corner of the building, you can see the jagged line of the bricks. A surface with a nor map would not have that feature.
Displacement maps do, beacuse they actually move the vertices of an object. Displacement maps generally require lots of subdivision or subsurf levels to render properly.
The normal vector is a vector that points directly out of “the front side of” a plane.
The computer defines the familiar rule that “the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection” in terms of the normal-vector… so that, if (for whatever reason) the normal-vector isn’t considered to be “90-degrees-perpendicular to the surface of the plane,” you’ll get a change in that reflection. The reflection is calculated, not based on the orientation of the plane itself, but on the orientation of the ‘normal vector.’
… And the reason why we make such a distinction is so that we can have normal-maps! 
A normal-map causes the computer to treat the direction of the normal-vector (for each particular point) as being displaced from “90-degrees-perpendicular,” in a manner dictated by the map, so that you get “a change in those reflections” and you get it “on the cheap!”
(CG folks love “cheats” that produce good results with less calculation!)
What you get is a pretty-gosh-darned-good “bumpiness” to an otherwise-flat plane, without complicated geometry or expensive calculations. Which is also why these maps are dubbed, “bump maps.”
Most of the time, you get away with it just fine, because most of the time what actually tells your eye that “such-and-so surface is ‘bumpy’” is the way that light reflects off that surface and makes shadows.
Well, I got the problem worked out on the sky…I switched the skymap to “tube”
As for the walls I think I might be on to something…I’ll post an updated picture tomorrow.
BTW, everyone: -thanks for the input on disp and nor
here is the city so far… (more houses)
I finally found out what happened with the walls.
All the other parts are sections, but the one that goes across the middle of the city is 1 piece, so…the texture is stretch on that section!
But I’ll have that corrected by this evening.
Well, I was trying to render some different angles of the city and noticed a new problem.
The horizon starts half way up in the sky…I can’t figure it out.
I put the “real” feature on so that it would “move”
but this has me confused…
here is a pic of the problem
you can use the d.x d.y d.z to adjust the way its maped sould be abel to adjust it to the right angel
