Thanks for the heads-up about the article(s). I love geeking out with stuff like that.
From time to time when I've been mapping-active, I think about documenting part of the process with nice pictures etc., but whenever I sit down with a free hour or two I usually end up thinking "well I could poke around at writing something up, or I could actually make progress on my current map." Props to folks who take the time to share these nifty details. Just so you know, even people familiar with your topic will often find something new to think about, or at the very least enjoy observing a fellow hobbyist at work.
One thing that would be ULTIMATE COOLNESS would be if someone took a "time lapse photography" series of an interesting section of their map, from start to finish, and made a movie out of it. Although, while doing a project like that, it would have the downside of frequently reminding you how much time the map is sucking out of your life.
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Some random contributions about the methodology I've personally ended up with for construction, since I'm done with mapping for tonight and my only alternative activity is sleeping. (This doesn't even touch other design ideas about the "hook" for your map or planning its general aesthetic.)
I'm a bad pencil sketcher, and sketching doesn't give me a good feel for gameplay, so I sketch with the editor. Floors are the combat surfaces, so I start with floors "suspended in space" inside an enclosing box, for me to run around on. A few other surfaces if necessary to get the essential shape of the playing field. First pass at entity placement as well.
Next is the remaining basic walls/ceilings to get a better feel for sightlines and try some bot play.
When I have the layout I want, I rip out everything except the floors again. I've found that if I have squarish walls and ceilings staring at me it's hard for me to build any interesting shapes.
After that I mess around with detailed brushwork making up some "themes", e.g. this is what the wall will look like for basement halls. The final proportions of the various themed pieces help adjust how the playable areas fit together.
Once a few themes are ready to go, I start doing the real brushwork. In the process I end up making new themes or adjusting existing ones.
It seems to help a lot, for me, to have superficially-conflicting demands to try to deal with... floors and patterns that don't meet up in tidy, obvious ways. Sometimes I spend several minutes just rotating a section on various axes staring at it, trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to put the puzzle pieces together in a way that looks right w/o screwing with the layout. It seems that there's always an answer, if you're willing to tear up enough of your already-laid brushwork
, and the result can help improve the look or even the layout of the map by driving you away from obvious/boring solutions.
I think it's common to do approximately-final texture work as you beaver your way across the map doing the detailed brushwork, but it could be worthwhile to try to make the map look cool with just a few solid textures, or even just "caulk", and then do your texturing pass after the brushwork is done. (Which may cause reconsideration of some of the brushwork; c'est la vie.) The danger in the latter approach is over-detailing the brushwork.
My current project -- sixth map if you count a UT duel map that I eventually abandoned when the editor pissed me off one too many times -- is the first time I've followed all of the above ideas. A few months from now I may be singing a different tune!
... but after some thought, the articles just show that even though something may be obvious, in most cases folks just don't see it (including myself)...