Making Campaign Maps

[FunkBGR]

Not sure if it'd help, but for people using GIMP -

This guy took some open source GIMP, and made it more user-friendly to Photoshop users
http://www.gimpshop.com/

 

[JVisgaitis]

I'm working on it!

Hey, that looks great! I'm in an artistic funk with this right now. On the map I have that I'm working on I have mountains, swamp, and the desert, but I hate it so I'm not posting it. What I did add is rivers which is really easy and I like how they came out.

For the rivers I took the file into Painter and drew them on their own layer using the Scratchboard variant under Pens. You need to exaggerate the look of your rivers so that the stroke and glow you have around the land works. After I have them drawn in, I take the file back into Photoshop. I select everything on the rivers layer and switch to the land layer and hit the delete key. Voila, instant rivers! One problem I have is because I didn't account for the rivers in the beginning, they don't have the blue texture in them from the rest of the water layer. I use the Rubber Stamp and draw the rivers back in. You can't really see it on this layer because of the glow, but it does show on the highres.

This step took me about 15 minutes cuz I had to keep tweaking it to my liking. Hopefully I can get out of this funk and get some mountains on the map next time.

 

[kensanata]

This is so cool. [imager]http://farm1.static.flickr.com/156/391518125_da0a5465dc_m.jpg[/imager]

If you're doing this in the Gimp: Make sure the lowest layer is the ocean layer, and make it all blue. The part below the land mass is not required to be transparent; in fact, we want a little blue to shine through and color the rivers. Create a new layer, take a pencil (I used circle07), and draw rivers. Use alpha to selection to select just them, move to the land layer and cut. You should see the ocean shining through. If you added any borders and glow, delete these layers and redo it, so that the glow fills the rivers and the border follows the rivers. The glow used the color white, glow radius 15, blur radius 10, and opacity 75; the border was a free border of size 4 and opacity 80. Then switch to the border line layer and use a gaussian blur of radius 2 to soften it.

At a larger resolution (Flickr page) you can see that I used a lousy touch pad to draw the rivers. If I were doing a real map, I'd draw it using a pencil and scan it instead, since I don't own a tablet.

I haven't managed to get those pointy river sources in the Gimp. Does anybody know how to do it? Or is that what you get for using a pressure sensitive tablet?

 

[JVisgaitis]

I haven't managed to get those pointy river sources in the Gimp. Does anybody know how to do it? Or is that what you get for using a pressure sensitive tablet?

That's something you get with the scratchboard tool and pressure sensitivity with a tablet. You shouldn't have a problem creating this in the Gimp tho, but it is a bit more work. You can try using a real thin eraser brush (like 1 pixel diameter) on the land layer and just creating them on the fly with your layer effects on so you can see the results. Just erase out to a point. You can also try just using the Lasso select tool and making a point and just deleting. Again, just do this directly on the land layer so you can delete and see the results.

One thing you want to be careful of (and I know you said your working on a touchpad) is watching for overlap and unnatural straight lines with your rivers. I see that in a couple of areas and its an easy fix. I even had some of those that I had to straighten up. You can just paint land back directly onto the land layer to fix those.

Its very cool that someone else is working along with me. Anyone else want to share what they're doing? The point of me doing this is to help you out, so I'll gladly answer questions.

 

[James Heard]

I knocked this out in Photoshop in a few hours, including a lot of loafing around. There are probably a lot of goof-ups and artifacts in mine, because I was pressing for a quick finish and "how would that work?" rather than perfection.

The basic landmass outlines were done more or less similarly to other people's ideas on how to do so, though I scrubbed out textures onto the base forms by hand because with a big enough brush I just like it more for control. Then I doodled out templates for the base shapes, a mountain template for the mountains, the One Tree by which all trees are formed, etc. Then I resized them to be tiny, copied them, and banged out everything in a Paste--->Move fashion (sometimes making larger groups to make it easier) and it was done pretty quickly. I tossed some watercolor and colored pencil effects on the grouped and merged shapes, and finally finished it off by desaturating it some because I thought it looked a little more like a computer map with the brighter colors than I was happy with.

 

[FunkBGR]

Wow

I'm going to sit down with GIMP this weekend and try to follow along. I'm not expecting much, but even if I get more familiar with the program, I'll be happier.

These are looking really nice . . .

 

[kensanata]

You can try using a real thin eraser brush (like 1 pixel diameter) on the land layer and just creating them on the fly with your layer effects on so you can see the results. Just erase out to a point.

I will have to try that and redo the border.

Its very cool that someone else is working along with me.

Actually this "one step every couple of days" format works very well for me. Just the right pacing, hehe.

 

[helium3]

If you're interested in making your map really ssssllllooowwwwllllyyyy like I did, you can:

(A) Draw out the different pieces of the map in pencil.
(B) Sketch your final image with pen.
(C) Erase all of the rest of the pencil, but don't worry to much about getting all of it. Just make sure it's significantly lighter than the ink.
(D) Scan the pen drawings in and use photo editing software (I use Microsoft Photo Editor, which came bundled with my ancient copy of office) to crop out everything but the part's relevant to your map.
(E) Save the cropped scans as bitmap files.
(F) Import the bitmaps into Inkscape and use the Trace>Bitmap command to edge your ink drawings.
(G) Delete the traced bitmaps.

This leaves you with a nice vector object that you can fiddle around with.

If you want an object to have color in it, you have two options:

(1) you can export the object as a bitmap and use Microsoft Paint to fill in all the white spaces (or whatever your background color is) with whatever color you want and then reimport that colored bitmap to your drawing or

(2) You can create colored objects that precisely match the borders of your vector object and put the colored objects behind the tracings.

In my map, the coastline and ocean swells are done with the first method and the rest of the parts of the map are with the 2nd.

Once you've got your map assembled from the tracings and background bitmap you can re-export the whole shebang as another bitmap.

 

[kensanata]

Oh, I didn't know about this use of Inkscape. Excellent! I wondered how you had created your map in the competition. (A favorite of mine!)

 

[helium3]

Yeah. It's pretty cool because you can get a nice clean looking map that doesn't suffer from having the same object copied and pasted over and over. It's really time consuming though. I spent four workdays on it, though half of that was on the first iteration of the map that I put together before the much more detailed map was posted.