Figuring out 3d mapping some more

 Hi All,

  Just a quick one. I've been noodling around with Blender more, trying to understand how the various nodes work and get them to achieve the look I'm going for on my own project.

Here is my erstwhile map configured using Sam Bowman's procedural terrain technique but using my height map to displace. The water needs work still and I'm trying out different ideas for how to mask out the rivers better.

One thing I finally figured out is how to view the effect of the Color Ramp by adding a viewer node. Shift+Ctrl+Left Click on the node you want to view and it will insert a viewer node for you. Now I can see where the mountains are getting their stone texture in white, for instance.

I did get a little farther with the Toby Rawal version, but I was having some difficulties with the Color Ramps and decided to go to Sam's method. I also really dislike how I did the water here.

Anyway, in general I like the look of the Bowman method better. 

Hobby on.

Mapping progress using Photoshop, Wilbur and Blender.

 Hi All,

I've had a few things going on, but not a lot of time for the blog. After the school year ended for us, Aidan and I went to Kublacon and had a good time. At some point I'll do a overview report of that.

I'm still sitting on our last local game of MESBG for a video/comic report and I intend to do some for the games we played at Kublacon. I'm a tad behind on doing track photos and band photos, but I should have more time soon.

In between honey do projects for my in-laws I've gotten back to working on my map.

It turns out I've gone back to some tutorials I found years ago and tried some things out.

First I roughly followed this PDF to make a height field in Photoshop. You could just use it to make the map and be done. I, of course, made things more complicated.

Here is my completed heightfield. It took me three iterations.

I then tried to follow a tutorial for running this height map through Wilbur and it took me several tries before I understood what exactly was going on with the software. For one thing my image is 7200 x 5400 and that puts a lot of stress on my Surface Tablet when running things in Wilbur. Particularly Incise Flow Erosion. That aforementioned PDF talks about how to process the image through Wilbur, but I found a more in detail one that helps with placing rivers and lakes where you want them, here.

In it they discuss making masks and there is a very detailed PDF link included for the Wilbur operations used.

This is the Height Map I exported from Wilbur.

Some of my forced river valleys are a tad clunky, but you get the overall concept.

I've then been trying to work out how to use Toby Rawal's process from this video.

This is what I have so far.

Obviously a lot of work left to do. I mostly spent time setting up the Node tree to get all of my Textures and mixes in, but the mix is acting a tad bizarre. I don't totally care for my water at the moment and The sand should obviously only be on the shore line.

I've also played around with Terresculptor, but I haven't learned how to use it well yet. It does look promising though.

You can get the latest version of Wilbur (1.92 I think) here. Supposedly if you have Fracterra from Profantasy that is the commercial version of Wilbur.

Anyway, I hope you are living your best hobby life. Let me know if you have questions or want to share how you make maps.

Cheers.

Map making resources - Nice Photoshop Brushes

 Hi All,

Well, life grinds ever onward and I haven't had as much "free" time as I thought I might. To be honest I might also not be using my downtime very effectively, but that's nothing new.

For today I wanted to share some photoshop brushes I found for fantasy map making. As many of you may recall, I have been making some and mostly waffling about fantasy maps. I have used Hexographer and Worldographer, but never really been satisfied with my attempts with it. I recently purchased Campaign Cartographer through Humble Bundle. It looks good, but I haven't had it in me to work through the tutorials yet.

So I thought, maybe someone has made some photoshop brushes for the Dutch Cartographer Blaeu? I had this idea way back when, but like most of my ideas, never pulled the trigger. One Google search later I found this gentleman's website. K.M. Alexander

He is apparently an author and it looks like he likes to make his own maps for his novels. I might try out one of his books or just "buy a coffee" for him as a way of saying thanks. Anyway, where you want to go is the Free Stuff tab.

Although the brushes are now no longer in the Free Stuff section, you can see they have their own page now. There are some tutorials on how to use the brushes at the bottom of this page.

He has a bunch of interesting sets, but I was interested in cartography sets in particular. The original search lead me to the Blaeu set.

This other set, Janssonius, looked interesting so I downloaded it as well. I hope to have something to show you soon, but who knows? I'll probably do something else and forget all about this for another half decade.

Theoretically I'll have some posts about my Perry Plastics and how to input you WFRP 4e character into the online character sheet, but don't hold your breath.

Happy hobbying.

My Map Quest.

Hi All,

I know, this map thing.

Let's just refresh in our minds what we're talking about.

Here's the scan and rebuild of the Mighty Empires tile map that I made with my gaming buddy almost 30 years ago.

This was my hand drawn interpretation that I colored in. I made lots of xeroxes of the base map and we used it for a play by mail campaign.

As I have shown, many many times on this blog, I've been trying to input this into Worldographer and get a usable hex map that I can drill down into. So I did this.

This is just one section of the the whole map that I input into the program. You can see I'm using the trace underlay feature and doing 4 hexes to one from the paper map. My idea was to make a Kingdom level map, where each hex is about 6miles. One day of travel for a large army across wilderness. Actually 6 miles is a measurement from Adventure, Conqueror, King and it correlates fairly well with 5 mile breakdown from Charles S Grant's Wargame Campaigns. The problem is that the major cities were way too close together at this scale.

After faffing about with trying to copy this map into one up a layer of size, I gave up and bit the bullet. I decided to redo the map from scratch increasing the scale of my paper map hex by 4. So 16 6mile hexes instead of 4 per paper map hex.

I almost didn't do it, I have a long history of getting frustrated with making this map, but I let my stubbornness take over. Originally I had dreaded having to go back in, hex by hex for a 208 hex square map instead of the original 52. Then I realized there was a paint bucket function. Duh!

So, still a fair amount of work, but much quicker at the moment.

Not bad. I filled in all the Grassland and three colors of ocean. Just did it here and there when I had time during the week. The plan is to fill in all the basic terrain types. Plains, Forests, Hills, Mountains and then massage the individual hexes as I drill down into the individual political divisions.

I also finally started putting together my unit of Skaven Slaves. I'll post more on that another time.

Thanks for looking.

Back to map making and world building

Hi All,

We're back in the middle of Cross Country season and my daughter has started doing more extracurricular stuff as well, but is not quite ready to drive herself. So I somehow haven't had the time to sit down and blog.

Hobby stuff has been happening, but it's been a fair amount of noodling around with not much completed to show for it.

I thought I would share how my mapping of my old Mighty Empires campaign world has progressed. Like a lot of things in life, I find myself waffling about and abandoning and re-engaging in projects all the time.

Above is the map with reduced opacity so that I can trace the coastline and see where the terrain goes. Below is the opaque version which does a better job of hiding the polygons I'm using to trace the coast.

If you have been following my map saga, you may remember I have been struggling with how to scale the Mighty Empires map and make it part of a larger world map. I thought that Worldographer was the answer, and then ran into difficulties that I couldn't get my head around.

I then saw another software on Kickstarter that looked cool and plumped down a chunk of change for that. Of course now the bug was back and I reopened Worldographer and started noodling around with it. After a few calculations, and many failures, I think I figured out a scheme. I got on the forums and worked out a little of the things I needed to understand better to work around.

I am currently redoing the coastline, fixing which hexes are land and sea and then adding a polygon to make the coastline. My rule of thumb is the hex has to be at least half land for it to be a land hex. I then make either a land or a sea polygon to make the coast. I will probably adjust the shapes of the other terrain with polygons to make them less angular as I progress. I also need to adjust the terrain a little bit and play with the hex stats, such as elevation.

I ran the auto generated coast tool on it, but I am deleting most of those polygons so that I can match my original map.

Anyway, yadda yadda. Blah, blah.

Thanks for looking.

PS - Each hex is 6 miles, bath tubbing the size of Mighty Empires I think. I went with the convention of 4 sub hexes per large hex. So going up to the Region level will give me 24 mile hexes, Continent will be 96 miles, World 384 miles.

Mapping Progress

Hi All,

Just wanted to share some minor progress I've made in mapping of late.

I think you'll all recall my Mighty Empires campaign.

Monfel is the area I want to map more closely to give more fluff to the Bretonnian army I've been making for the OWAC.

One of the main issues I was having was how to get my head around the scale. Mighty Empires makes things seem pretty big and I thought that maybe each ME tile represented 250 - 300 miles if we think about an army moving approximately 10 mile per day. This makes these territories absolutely huge. The Adventurer Conqueror King system is based around 24 and 6 mile hexes so I was trying to figure out how to glom on to that.

I finally figured it out. Each one of my Mighty Empires hexes would be 96 miles, four 24 mile hexex across. It then dovetails neatly with the ACKS 4 to 1 hex map. Of course they didn't have the hexes oriented the way I wanted, so I had to make the above hex grid after much trial and error.

I had to blow up my original hand drawn map about 400% to get it to roughly fit my new grid. I'm trying out some things , hence the notations, but I think I'll leave the terrain as is and only start adding sub hex features on the next level down.

I intend to use Welsh Pipers guide to help with that some. I used Omni Calculator to help me get my head around the area of a 96 mile across hex. This list of Countries by land area is also helpful in collecting ones thoughts.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Thanks for looking.

Of Imagi-Nations, Maps and Fonts

So while I was trying to find things to fix various broken plumbing and appliances, I took a few moments to flesh out some ideas for the 18th Century Imagi-Nation project.

First off we need a map. Since I have a soft spot for hex maps I revisited the Welshpiper and revisited his hex map templates.

So a little finagling, a rotation of the brain graphic and I give you the base for Cerebria.

I'm also getting the idea for the colonial areas of Liverica and Splenia, with perhaps the Stomach and Pancreas thrown in.

I then started thinking about fonts. While looking for Autorealm fonts I found this post.


http://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.com/2012/02/fonts-for-flags.html

In the comments to this post were a couple of good link recommendations:

http://www.google.com.au/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=18th+century+fonts

and this one, which also had a guide on how to use ligatures.

http://www.orbitals.com/self/ligature/ligature.htm

The only issue for me now is I can't figure out how to use the macros. I've never used them in word and I apparently can't use them in Open Office as the Word ones are in a different scripting language.

But I did end up downloading a few 18th Century fonts from dafont and also re-acquainted myself with abstract fonts. Speaking of which (okay it's really only tenuously related) you can find fonts similar to your favorite D & D editions here (or rather the names of fonts that are close approximations).

Precious little done on the Talomir project, I hope to fix that this weekend.

Map of NW Talomir WIP

Just wanted to share a map I've been working on between chores today. It is the setting of THW's Talomir in what has been referred to as Norwes.

It includes Mirholme, Tereken, Capalan, Altengard, Malohad, Valkae, half of Ekra, most of Seniira, part of the Tropilium Imperium, and tiny snippets of Sortium.

I'm not totally happy with how it's going, but it does have some character. Mostly the edges of the terrain are too uniform. I've used a combination of techniques, but primarily following those set forth by RobA of the Cartographers Guild. Notable additions are the "Ice cap" to cover unknown area and the ridge between the forest and desert in the Malohad peninsula.

Hope you like it. Any critiques appreciated.

Next will be to highlight the countries and provinces.

Fabulous maps of Greyhawk

In an effort to avoid household chores and external Christmas lighting I thought I'd post about a site that I can't say enough about.

That site is Atlas of the Flanaess by Anna B Meyer. These maps are simply stunning and she has really put a lot of work into them. They seem to show the continent after the Greyhawk Wars, something that completely passed me by when it came out.

They come complete with heraldry and fairly detailed settlements, roads and borders. You can also check her group out on facebook.

Here is a low res image of her latest release:

Enjoy!

Map Of Talomir Project

So to add to my gaming ADD I've begun a mapping project for Talomir, the world of WHAA and RRtK from Two Hour Wargames.

I'm not sure how hush hush it is, but there is some stuff in the works. Right now it is building off of existing maps that can be found in the THW yahoo groups.

Ordnance Maps of Roman Britain

Awhile back Paul (of the mancave) posted this link to a campaign for wargaming in Arthurian Dark Age Britian http://darkagewargaming.wordpress.com/category/age-of-arthur/

In reading through one of the posts, which are extremely interesting, the author made mention of using ordnance maps if you chose to do a map based campaign. So I thought I'd do a little search and found this site http://www.bibliographics.com/MAPS/BRITAIN/BRIT-MAP-FRAME-LOOK.htm

I'm trying not to let this lead me too far astray for now, but for me the tug of maps is almost irresistable. At some point I may take these and grid them further.

Enjoy.

Sean

PS- I was away on vacation for the last few weeks and found no time for posting. I hope to be posting again more regularly once my kids are in school.

The Hamlet of Eadagbrycg

As I flail about, trying to play my first raid, I made this map. As usual I am trying to learn several things at once and not fully accomplishing any.

Eorund had decided that in order to test the mettle of his band he would perform a raid along the coast of England.

So the trip is successful on a roll of 3+ and I rolled 3 (+1for Norse sailing, +1 for Gautar's Navigating skill. The trip thus costs 25, 1 for each man and so the band has 44 left in it's coffers.

They will attack the sleepy Saxon hamlet of Eadagbrycg (to me sounds like Eat a Brick).

The idea is to be representing a 3' x 3' table (bounded by cobblestones). The rough patch at top right is a hill and the river is fordable at the road. I used THW (Two Hour Wargames) terrain table to roll it up and then added the two buildings. Each square in the grid represents an inch of table top.

Generic Age of Blood Campaign Map

As requested by Paul from the mancave, here is a generic version of my Age of Blood Campaign map. Feel free to use it for your own campaigns. It is still a little rough but not too bad if you don't look too carefully.

Skal!

Eorund's map

Here is a map I whipped up (actually a couple of hours) to give a rough lay of the land for my campaign.