Thread: Political Map Making?

FT's painting tools are rather primitive so you'd probably be better off exporting the basic image to something like a PNG and painting in your political information in an external progrma such as PhotoShop, GIMP, or even CC3. FT's biggest deficiency is its inability to place text on a map.

If you'd like to try doing it in FT directly, you can paint color information into an image overlay in FT. The overlay can be set to show for only areas that are above water, which makes the borders easier. Unfortunately, FT lacks any kind of border filtering algorithm that would convert those patches of color into the kind of hand-painted borders that people seem to like.

You can combine waldronate's two approaches, too. Export your planet to something you can work with in a drawing / painting / editing program. I use Serif's PhotoPlus - it's inexpensive and reasonably capable. There are choices from free to Very Expensive, from simple to hideously complex. Your profile doesn't list software yet - what do you already use, or what would you like to learn?

Since borders often follow physical features, I worked on a layer above some kind of topo view, with rivers. I drew in a color that'd be useful on a variety of FT views - red for example. Then I exported just the borders - I think it was in .gif, with all but the borders transparent. Then I registered the border drawing as an overlay - a bit of a pain I recall. Sorry if that's sketchy - I did it once years ago and my recollection may be fading.

You want to work with a large enough view and a small enough line weight that whatever size you typically view FT in will match. If you draw in something like equirectangular, overlay it, then shift to something like orthographic projection, your border lines will 'wrap', but they are raster not vector, so you'll have linewidths wildly varying by latitude.

I would like to find a program that i could use pretty easy, I have been messing around with the FractalTerrains Demo.
What would a good program be for making maps from world map size to town map size?

It feels funny making such a short post after those two long ones...

Originally Posted by cypruss11

I would like to find a program that i could use pretty easy, I have been messing around with the FractalTerrains Demo.
What would a good program be for making maps from world map size to town map size?

It feels funny making such a short post after those two long ones...

For such a broad range of scales you want a fairly generalist piece of software like The GIMP or Inkscape.

If you want to do small scale maps well, you might benefit from a GIS like QuantumGIS which can adjust projections.