Feedback Thread: Maps

[robertsconley]

Please take a look if you've got a moment - Useable? Ugly? Sane?

DM version -

https://imgur.com/a/0Gztb1X

Player-facing battlemap version -

https://imgur.com/a/rX6xRai

Overall I like the design and composition. However I don't like the painted background of the cliff. If it was me I would go for something in this style. Basically a color pen & ink drawing.



Because this is a map for tabletop role-playing, there is a functionality aspect. That is why I think people like my (and Harn's) use of white buildings amid the natural colors.


Now I just grabbed some random image. For the background of a map like yours I would commission it from an artist like Richard Luscheck who is excellent at color ink and pen.

Illustration — The Artwork of Richard Luschek

www.richardluschek.com

 

[The1True]

I always like Harn maps

Me too! I've got an old Harn folio that I like to open up and pore over once in a while. The Greyhawk maps are nice too. I'm starting to be less and less of a fan of the smooth-edged, cut out with scissors and/or exacto look that turns features into blobs, though. The Greywoods above is a good example of what I'm talking about. I've started to experiment with ways to make the edges of my features more ragged or blurred (or both) to get away from this.

I love how clear and easy to read the above map is. It invites travel. I guess in my mind though, the more coffee-table Atlas-y look, though busier, is less sterile, more immersive and inviting of exploration - especially at greater scale.

 

[The1True]

Vector combined with transparencies and bitmap fills.

ho-LEE SHIT.

Corel Draw?

Daaaaaaamn, bro!!! That is some dedication. You gotta work with the tools you know (or that are available) though, eh.
Quite a trip on the wayback machine seeing that. Next we're going to have someone here doing all their maps in Fractal Painter Pro

 

[squeen]

The colors remind me of the Darlene Greyhawk maps (which you helped restore).

 

[robertsconley]

I love how clear and easy to read the above map is. It invites travel. I guess in my mind though, the more coffee-table Atlas-y look, though busier, is less sterile, more immersive and inviting of exploration - especially at greater scale.

Thanks, and I appreciate the compliment. Back in the day, while I liked the Harn look it also had one major virtue. It was something I could draw myself by hand!

Then I got CorelDRAW in the early 90s and learned how to the above on the computer. The reason I drew the map on the left (and several other like it) is because my original Wilderlands maps were falling apart by the late 80s. So I created a light table out of a painting stand and a piece of plexiglass and used my technical pens and color stick to recreate them. But with my modifications that was turning it into the Majestic Wilderlands like the 12.5 mile per hex scale.

With the CSIO map, I had some issues with the original. I didn't like how the City walls were laid out and I wanted more alleyways. Plus tweaked the building layout outside of the city walls.

Me too! I've got an old Harn folio that I like to open up and pore over once in a while. The Greyhawk maps are nice too. I'm starting to be less and less of a fan of the smooth-edged, cut out with scissors and/or exacto look that turns features into blobs, though. The Greywoods above is a good example of what I'm talking about. I've started to experiment with ways to make the edges of my features more ragged or blurred (or both) to get away from this.

Actually I deal with that issue with the border. In the case of cultivated land and certain terrain, I leave it a hard edge, but for others, like forests, plains, and deserts, I will blur the edges.



The issue is that I don't do this until the last steps before publication. CorelDRAW has two ways of doing this. Both involve applying a Gaussian Blur. On smaller maps, I can apply blur to vector objects. However, this is a major performance hit on larger maps due to the on-the-fly processing to accomplish this. So, on these maps, I convert the object into a bitmap and then blur it. But I lost the ability to alter the edge, hence why I put it off until late in the development of the map.

 

[robertsconley]

ho-LEE SHIT.

Corel Draw?

Daaaaaaamn, bro!!! That is some dedication. You gotta work with the tools you know (or that are available) though, eh.
Quite a trip on the wayback machine seeing that. Next we're going to have someone here doing all their maps in Fractal Painter Pro

Well in my defense CorelDRAW is still being updated yearly. Although for a couple of years, the company that owns it has been trying to milk it for cash hence I only update every four to five years.

Even tho I pay for Creative Studio, I still stick with CorelDraw mostly because how it handles fills. From what I tried in Illustrator you have to turn objects into masks that crops out a large bitmap you hide in your drawing. I kinda get it, but CorelDRAW handles a fill, whether it is solid, a bitmap, vector, etc., a property of the object itself. So much better. Certainly Illustrator's approach is less memory intensive which is why they probably adopted it in the first place.

One reason fills are important to me is that I collect old dry transfer sheets and scanned them. I focus on the ones used by Judges Guild and the old Wargaming companies to make their maps.
From here

John Cooper's Web Site - Gaming Stuff Page

In the 2000s I bought a CD full of scanned images from LetraSet one of the few surviving art supply companies who made these sheets. Then later I found a store on Etsy that also sells them.

craftytransfers - Etsy

Shop Vintage rub on dry transfers & screentone by craftytransfers located in Stanford, United Kingdom. Smooth shipping! Has a history of shipping on time with tracking. Rave reviews! Average review rating is 4.8 or higher

www.etsy.com

So I bought a dozen or so to fill out the gaps in my collection that I bought from Letraset.

If you have a copy of Melan's Xyntillian, you can see how I use them, particularly on the first floor.



One major thing I am missing on CorelDraw are Illustrator style brushes. Specifically the type that allows you to draw vector objects in a line. With Corel it a lot more difficult for me to do that.

For example the below map, the Harn folks with Adobe Illustrator can just pick a brush and draw the walls with the proper endcap with a few click.



For me, the above was a bit more convoluted, and the result was a bunch of separate objects, making later editing a pain. So may yet buckle down again with Illustrator and figure out how to use it to draw my maps.



The last thing I want to mention is Inkscape, which is free and open source. If Corel Corp gets that bad, I know how to use it to do my maps, although its brushes are not on par with Illustrator's. But for someone who want to learn vector map creation and not invested in the pricier options it is a good choice.

Inkscape - Draw Freely. | Inkscape

Inkscape is professional vector graphics software which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows desktop computers.

inkscape.org

 

[robertsconley]

The colors remind me of the Darlene Greyhawk maps (which you helped restore).

I was influenced by Darlene's Greyhawk in some of my color choices. Equally important was what was commonly available for coloring sticks from Prismacolor in the late 80s. Somewhere, I still have my notes on which specific Prismacolor codes I needed to do my hand-drawn maps.

And for those who are interested here is the link to the digital version I created.

https://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/greyhawk/World%20of%20Greyhawk,%20Digital_Dec_24.zip

Note that it includes a SVG file that you can open up in Inkscape if you want to edit the map. I also layered the shit out of it both in the PDF and SVG files. I was going to do a Harn style version at first but working with Zach and helping him with the text of his bitmap version allowed me to figure out how to vectorize the entire map. Zach laboriously cropped out the colors for his layers. So he had a bunch of black and white layers of the forest, and mountain and other terrain elements without the color fill. I found the right settings in CorelTrace to turn them into vector objects.

While Zach version is a 100% dead on, mine is only 99% dead on as a result of the vectorization. However with mine if you want to crazy you can print it 8 feet wide and four feet high and it will be as sharp as it was at the smaller size. Plus I can more easily make alternate versions like a b/w Greyhawk map that looks like Darlene made it.

I may yet do a Harn style version with Alyssa Faden's details from her map incorporated.

 

[squeen]

@robertsconley : Outstanding. Thanks!

 

[DangerousPuhson]

ho-LEE SHIT.

Corel Draw?

Next we're going to have someone here doing all their maps in Fractal Painter Pro

*discreetly slides copy of Jasc PaintShop Pro X under bed*

 

[robertsconley]

*discreetly slides copy of Jasc PaintShop Pro X under bed*

Reaches into the deck and pull out a

 

[The1True]

However with mine if you want to crazy you can print it 8 feet wide and four feet high

A real treat getting a peak at your (somewhat Byzantine) process! I find sometimes part of the joy of creation is the process itself. Probably why I got into etching and print-making back in highschool; messing around with rosin and acid exposure. fun.

I mostly prefer to work with bitmap art software, but the limitation as you have pointed out, is that I can't upscale it without a significant loss of resolution. I havn't used Corel since the 90's, and I fear there's no going back now, so I've started building things that may need frequent editing or to be zoomed in/out on in 3D. This has the added benefit of allowing different camera angles on maps in case you want a 3/4 or just a illustration for the margins. The risk there is getting distracted for hours with superficial details.


I forced the perspective on this one, but could have just as easily done a top-down, orthogonal view for a more accurate map.

 

[The1True]

Player-facing battlemap version

Have you tried playing around with the colour of your grid? Various filters could make it light over dark parts of the map and dark over the light parts. That and a reduction of transparency might make it less distracting but still usable.

 

[squeen]

The past few years I've been writing my own AutoCAD clone (circa. R13!) in C/OpenGL and it allows for mixed vector/bitmap elements, but dynamically trimming of texture-boundaries I haven't coded yet. My main concern was being able to clean up hand-drawn maps with vector-CAD, e.g. trimming, extending, fillets, etc. with real dimensions (feet, miles,...).



As a fresh-out of college mechanical engineer, I was a part of AutoCAD's initial rise to prominence (full-screen mode, MS DOS and later Windows 95/NT). The drafting dept. executed about have its work on real paper boards. I was one of the young turks who used software and skipped the drafters altogether. I've got this weird, 30 year old, muscle memory for the AutoCAD keyboard (command-line) short cuts. I coded those into my clone. Feels like yesterday.

Robert has me thinking about adding an SVG export option now for printing. Currently I just render a raster-image at up-sampled screen resolution to a back-buffer, so you get something that is at least 300dpi for an 8.5x11 page. SVG would be slick.

I only use GIMP for pure pixel-smashing, but I've never used inkscape much. Always thought of them as sister products.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I hate to say it because I recognize the skill required to make them and the clean usability of it, but... CAD-style maps just have no soul. They are all so supremely drab and dry to look at, no matter how eminently practical they may be.

If I bought an adventure and the map was all clean vector lines and shade-denoted areas, I'd be a little bummed out about it, to be honest. I like a map that inspires imagination and fosters the right atmosphere.

 

[squeen]

I hate to say it because I recognize the skill required to make them and the clean usability of it, but... CAD-style maps just have no soul. They are all so supremely drab and dry to look at, no matter how eminently practical they may be.

If I bought an adventure and the map was all clean vector lines and shade-denoted areas, I'd be a little bummed out about it, to be honest. I like a map that inspires imagination and fosters the right atmosphere.

You might be surprised that I 100% agree with you. For publication, I would always retrace and finish the maps by hand. It's just that some shapes are hard as heck to get right by hand and having CAD to assist really helps. Precising in scale too.

Takes both to handle all situations.

 

[The1True]

I 100% agree with this hybrid approach. Although, software is getting pretty could at replicating a shaky ink line. Definitely something you might consider coding into your CAD program at some distant future date!

 

[squeen]

Work-in-progress for the Giant Beaver Lodge side-trip that I mentioned over in the Hooks thread. Obviously I need to finish the inking, but I'm also going to change the style of the water (white on black?).

I either like drawing rubble and bramble (something John Byrne calls "argle-bargle"), or I'm just a glutton for punishment.

In anticipation of some comments: I understand there is absolutely no reason a maps needs to be so heavily cluttered with tiny detail --- "less is more", etc. --- but I like to experiment and discover a level-of-detail that is both beautiful and usable.

All in all, it's been fun trying to think like a beaver.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

The inked stuff looks fucking gorgeous. For what it's worth, I definitely get the beaver lodge vibes from this thing. Nailed it.

 

[Beoric]

The, uh, beaver skin rug is a disturbing feature.

I really like this. In my time I've disassembled many beaver dams, and tried to disassemble a beaver lodge. It doesn't need to follow those rules, but if you wanted it more proportionate to IRL beavers, I would say the walls could be made a lot thicker. A to-scale giant beaver lodge would be nigh impregnable to mundane methods of breaching it. Although passwall might do it, but I don't remember how far it extends.

 

[squeen]

The, uh, beaver skin rug is a disturbing feature.

It's got a story...

I really like this. In my time I've disassembled many beaver dams, and tried to disassemble a beaver lodge. It doesn't need to follow those rules, but if you wanted it more proportionate to IRL beavers, I would say the walls could be made a lot thicker. A to-scale giant beaver lodge would be nigh impregnable to mundane methods of breaching it. Although passwall might do it, but I don't remember how far it extends.

Interesting!

I just realize I left the grid off of this version. I've got the walls about 5-8' thick here, thinking that the giant beavers are about 5-6' long. Probably not "to scale" for a real/practical lodge. Maybe there's a little bit of "structural magic" at play.

Also, what I hope to make clear is that all points of egress are through underwater passages. I'm thinking of a little side-graphic to show that.