Quote from: CRKrueger;953256You should get the whole thing printed out on canvas in color and hang it like a tapestry behind your GM chair.  Or make a table that size and have it on parchment underneath the glass surface.  Shouldn't cost you more than a few grand for both.  

I vote for making it into a pashmina.

Interesting, I remember zipatone and the like.  It's what we used in high school for the creative writing journal.  Back then it was really cut and paste on the light blue grid.

Thanks for the zip file.  Love john coopers stuff.  Now just to figure out how to use the tiffs as fill in CorelDraw.

Quote from: estar;953262Canvas is a bit overboard considering I can get it printed using outdoor banner material between $50 to $100. But yeah I will doing something with the combined map. I probably say it is the only thing like it in the industry or hobby. Sure people have printed huge maps. How many were printed that were designed to be printed at that size as opposed to being a smaller poster sized map blown up to banner size.

Oh, man that would be way cool to have. 5x10 might be too big for me though... Would be cool to be able to order a custom size. With a bit smaller size, I could see rigging it up so I could hang it behind me for Google Hangouts games... (though for such, a campaign map that was landscape format would be better to totally hide the clutter behind me).

Of course 5x10 would be perfect for a convention booth..

Sweet fucky-fucky that maps looks awesome!  As far as printing this beauty, laminated!!!  

Estar- is this in conjunction with your Wilderlands RPG?

That map is insanely awesome!!! I'm such a cartography noob but I have a great interest in it. Just not enough time to dive deep like I want. Truly outstanding work

Quote from: RunningLaser;953379Sweet fucky-fucky that maps looks awesome!  As far as printing this beauty, laminated!!!

Appreciate the Compliment.

Quote from: RunningLaser;953379Estar- is this in conjunction with your Wilderlands RPG?

Tangentially, Judges Guild commissioned me to do those maps so they have a digital version of the original maps. I am one of two artists on the project. The other, Christina, is doing a handdrawn artist style map, and I am doing a more cartographic map.

As for my own work, I have a license agreement with Judges Guild to use their maps and selected IP to present the Majestic Wilderlands which is my own take on the Wilderlands. During the run up to the Necromancer Games Boxed set project everybody involved realized that all of our Wilderlands settings are pretty divergent. The original focused so much on local level detail that referee were frees to make up how the high level stuff worked. Think what would have happened if GDW never published the Library Data supplements and the original Spinward Marches was the only thing we had describing the Third Imperium.

It evolved something like this.

A annotated original map.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]796[/ATTACH]

As you can see my original were pretty worn and circa 1988 I didn't have a lot of duplicating options so I opted to re-draw the whole thing by hand. I took the oppourtunity to add in all the stuff I did throughout the 80s including a scale expansion from 5 miles to hex to 12.5 miles.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]797[/ATTACH]

Finally circa 2015 I now draw on the computer in this style. Which is what I been using for my published works.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]798[/ATTACH]

Quote from: estar;953281A bit of a story about that. Back in the day wargame maps, Judges Guild and many other publishers would have a map drawn up. But forested and other textured terrain were formed by using an x-acto knife to cut a section of stuff call Zipatone and applied to the specific region. It was some texture printed on a transparent background. There was a competitor that made Letratone.

Flash fowards to the middle 2000s and zipatone is gone and so is much of Letratone. All that remains are grayscale fills used by manga artists. However Letraset put out a CD-ROM with high quality scans of their Letratones including the swamp textures. A few years later a wargaming enthusiast re-creates several the more common zipatone fills and posts them online.

http://www.jrcooper.com/gaming.htm

With that as a source and a few things I was able to create independently I was able to put together a Hexcrawl Mapping Kit. This has a swamp, forest, and jungle texture you can use.
http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/map/Hex_Crawl_Map_Kit.zip

I love this whole thread, such a cartography nerd. Thanks especially for these resources!!!!! Great maps by everyone.

Here is my attempt to render the world of Earthdawn in a 3d engine (Unreal3): https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=14750

Spoiler

"Dry/Wet Climate Map without Seas/Rivers"


"Death's Sea without Lava or Water"


"Death Sea Lava Test (no ocean water)"


"Liaj Jungle (foreground left), Tylon Mts, (midground), Throal Mts (background), Twighlight Peaks (right)"


"Ocean Surface test"

I have some ideas for different ways to present a campaign map in a 2d/3d engine based on the map work done at the US Parks Services and some others that no-one but map nerds would know (Prof. Bernhard Jenny - formerly at the Oregon State University's Cartography Group - and that group's crazy-cool projects for working with 3d heightmaps).

I've really been meaning to research the on-school mapping symbols and styles. This is really cool, estar, THANKS! I'd like whatever tool I make to be able to flip between different styles and map projections, and those links make wrapping my head around "how did they create maps before digital tools" much easier.

In the hexcrawl mapping kit there are several fills: Forest, Jungle, Stipple, Swamp, Tropical Scrub.

The stipple is a random dot pattern that I use for hills or sand.

The first you need to understand is dots per inch. This relates directly to image quality as all these fills are bitmaps with a fixed number of pixels. Printers typically print at 300 dpi, your screen is 72 dpi. Which is why printed materials generally looks better. However with the advent of UltraHD (and Retina for the tablet) screen dpi is approaching print.

All the fills in the hexagon mapping kit are 300 dip. All but the tropical scrub are a 8.5" by 11" rectangular pattern. If you attempt to use any of these fills in an object that is larger than 8.5 by 11 then there will be visible seams as the pattern repeats.

The tropical scrub is only 2.25 by 1.75 but it doesn't have visible seams.

If you use any of Dan Cooper's fills use the 300 dpi and they are 3" by 3" and should not have any visible seams.

There are two way to use them in CorelDRAW. One is as a b/w white fill, and the other as a transparent fill.

To start off draw a shape or blog. Here I drew one using the bezier tool.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]802[/ATTACH]

With the shape selected, select pattern fill.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]803[/ATTACH]

The following dialog will appear. Browse and pick the desired fill. Then in the Width and Height enter the dimension I gave above. For example 8.5 by 11 for the forest fill. You can make the fill larger or smaller by playing with the height and width.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]804[/ATTACH]

Click OK and you will see the following. Remove the border line around the shape and you have a piece of forest on your map.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]805[/ATTACH]

Spoiler

Quote from: estar;953385Appreciate the Compliment.



Tangentially, Judges Guild commissioned me to do those maps so they have a digital version of the original maps. I am one of two artists on the project. The other, Christina, is doing a handdrawn artist style map, and I am doing a more cartographic map.

As for my own work, I have a license agreement with Judges Guild to use their maps and selected IP to present the Majestic Wilderlands which is my own take on the Wilderlands. During the run up to the Necromancer Games Boxed set project everybody involved realized that all of our Wilderlands settings are pretty divergent. The original focused so much on local level detail that referee were frees to make up how the high level stuff worked. Think what would have happened if GDW never published the Library Data supplements and the original Spinward Marches was the only thing we had describing the Third Imperium.

It evolved something like this.

A annotated original map.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]796[/ATTACH]

As you can see my original were pretty worn and circa 1988 I didn't have a lot of duplicating options so I opted to re-draw the whole thing by hand. I took the oppourtunity to add in all the stuff I did throughout the 80s including a scale expansion from 5 miles to hex to 12.5 miles.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]797[/ATTACH]

Finally circa 2015 I now draw on the computer in this style. Which is what I been using for my published works.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]798[/ATTACH]

Dude, thanks for sharing this with us.  Fucking incredible:)

The above only on black and white maps because the background of the bitmap is white. You can get around that by using the following steps.

The general idea is that CorelDRAW (and other vector drawing programs) supports transparent shapes. Shapes that appear as a piece of colored glass when placed over other shapes. You can use this feature with a bitmap to make fills that allow anything behind the white (or black depending on the setting) area to be seen. I will be using a swamp texture.

You start off by drawing a shape like this blog I drew using the bezier tool. Make it a solid black. You may at times want to use a 80% gray depending on how you want your map to look. Black can be a bit strong and dominate where it shouldn't.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]806[/ATTACH]

Next with the shape selected, you pick the transparency tool. The toolbar will change.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]807[/ATTACH]

Then you change the transparency from None to Bitmap Pattern. When you do that the part I circled will activate and you can click on it bringing up a dialog similar to the pattern fill dialog in the last post.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]809[/ATTACH]

In the Pattern fill dialog select your fill and then enter in the Width and Height. Same setup as the pattern fill setup in the previous post.

Likely the image will appear like a negative photograph. There are sliders you can use to adjust this. Luckily it is exact opposite of the default that CorelDRAW uses.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]811[/ATTACH]

This allows you lay the object with the fill over a colored area and have it bleed through like this. The best way to manage this is with layers.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]812[/ATTACH]

Hopes this answers you question on how to use this in CorelDRAW. If people are interested I can explain how to do this with Inkscape which is free to download and use.

Thanks for sharing the maps, Estar. Really beautiful stuff in all versions!

I notice though that the great-looking new maps smooth many of the details of the small-scale curves found on the hand-drawn maps. I realize it would probably be a lot more work to try to duplicate small-scale details using your method, and for seemingly little gain. But I'm curious how you feel about that effect?

Very cool maps!!  very impressive!

Quote from: Skarg;953495Thanks for sharing the maps, Estar. Really beautiful stuff in all versions!

I notice though that the great-looking new maps smooth many of the details of the small-scale curves found on the hand-drawn maps. I realize it would probably be a lot more work to try to duplicate small-scale details using your method, and for seemingly little gain. But I'm curious how you feel about that effect?

That can be an issue. When I draw coast lines and rivers, I use a Bamboo Tablet which allows me to use a pen. I don't still don't draw freehand but it allows better control over the bezier tool to add in the fine details.

And if I really want to replicate a hand drawn outline then what I will do is scan it. Size the bitmap on the bottom layer of the drawing to the correct size. Then draw over it on a higher layer with the bamboo and pen, tracing over the hand drawn lines. That what I did with the Wilderlands maps. With liberal use of zooming I am able to follow every zig and zag of a handdrawn line. If I had a better tablet I probably use pressure sensitivity to get the width right.

Having said there are a few things one can do to make a "better" looking map.

Use the texture fill of the software instead of a solid color. The best textures to use are three color clouds. For water pick three close shades of blue and let it randomize a texture. You can see this in the last Nomar drawing where the water, and ground are not single blobs of color.

More obvious are the light blue blur representing the shallows around the coast line. The way to do that is to copy the ground to a lower layer. Make it a lighter color of blue. Add a thick border of the same color, I use 3 points. Then use gaussian blur with a radius of 4 pixels (one greater than your border thickness) to blur the edge. This makes the coast lines and larger rivers "pop".

If you are using Corel, you need to turn the object into a bitmap before blurring it.

Doing these things make is look less like a computer. Also I buy of all Profantasy stuff for Campaign Cartographer. While I don't use that software often, I do use the bitmap art in some of my maps. Which is another technique you can use. Draw bits of the map, scan it, and then use it as a symbol. You can be quite clever and tricky doing that to make it look handdrawn.

Also as a general note, Inkscape can just about everything that I can do in CorelDRAW and it is free and open source to boot. The only reason I don't use it regularly is because I been using CorelDRAW since the early 90s. But if I couldn't afford to upgrade, I would make the switch.