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Tumbleweed

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So, I've made a little progress on the MapThing suite recently. Unfortunately it's not on HillThing though.

After recently spending an inordinately long time drawing, redrawing and shading a simple border I decided that I'd have a crack at automating some of the process. So I finally turned my attention to the newly re-christened BorderControl module for MapThing.

It's not feature-complete yet but I thought there was enough now to show a little of what it can do. So, first up a few examples...

Here is a simple boder created in the program with a few shadows and highlights added.

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Next up, the exact same border imported into PS over several layers and the blend modes meddled with..

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And lastly just a few more styles that can be easily accomplished in the program.

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Elements are placed by simply dragging a box over the viewer and releasing. It automatically resizes the length of the neatline cells to suit the dimensions - either automatically adjusting the number of cells on the Y-axis and keeping the lengths equal or allowing it to be manually set for different scales on X and Y.

It can also add corner panels, grids, rhumb lines and a cartouche panel.

I have yet to add the ability to tile a pattern around the pattern bar element and I also want to add a simple pattern creator for helping me to make celtic knot style borders.

As it is though it's really easy to create a border in a few seconds and along with an action saved in PS or Gimp it's possible to create a nice border in a minute. Maybe not as big a time-saver as TreeThing can be but a time saver for me nevertheless.

Comments

  1. Sapiento's Avatar
    Impressive!
  2. arsheesh's Avatar
    That's really cool Ramah!
  3. Ramah's Avatar
    Cheers guys. Unfortunately it looks like finding the time to work on this project is going to be hard again for a while which is a bit of a downer... especially with this blog being so super popular. 2313 views? :s
    Hehe. That can't be right.
  4. Troedel's Avatar
    Great work!
  5. Fluesopp's Avatar
    I'm impressed! This is becoming a great tool. I would suggest you add support to add images (town symbols, castles, etc), and roads (and as a deviation, rivers). NameThing could even follow the curvature of the road/river?
    Keep up the good work.
  6. Jaxilon's Avatar
    I just got here, somehow I never realized you were posting up in here. So cool, I'm interested in trying this out myself so I'll let you know if and when I do.
  7. vorropohaiah's Avatar
    only saw this today! this is really great stuff. I'd love toget my claws into this and try it out. sadly i know nothing about coding sop not sure how helpful my feedback would be! keep up the good work
  8. Ramah's Avatar
    Thanks guys.

    Jax, I haven't made BorderControl available yet as it is still very much a work in progress. Same as TextThing. I've not had much time to work on the program since I made this post but hopefully that will change soon.