Thread: YAHP (Yet Another Hello Post)

I'm glad you find the forum useful, MGCJerry, and welcome!

I'm surprised that as you're a 3d user that you haven't got into Photoshop/Gimp or similar apps for UV texturing.

Anyway, enjoy your stay and looking forward to seeing your work and/or hearing your views!

Ravs

Welcome to the Insanity!

Welcome to the forums MGCJerry! We look forward to your contributions and posts and hope that you become an active long term member.

Regarding the large map you have and want scanned, hunt down Gamerprinter on these boards. He has a printing/publishing business and large format scanners. He may be able to save you are great deal of time and energy and scan that for you. With it being newsprint though it may be too delicate, but I'm not familiar with the new scanners out there so talk to him.

Welcome, MGCJerry! I'm a long time CC2 (and now CC3) user myself, and the TCG forums are a great resource for using Profantasy software.

Welcome--especially because you entitled your post "YAHP", which I think will be my new favorite acronym!

I do hope you post some of your hand-drawn maps!

Thanks for the welcome everyone. Friendly bunch. :}

I'm now going to address some of the comments...

ravells:
Oh, I've gotten into Photoshop (version 5 LE) and trust me... I don't texture. ;} I'm not good at it and I have doing every single minute of UV Mapping and texturing. Despite all the times I've tried using Gimp, it always has stability issues with my configuration and crashes and quits a lot.

My old tool used to be Photo Finish 3 (yes, a windows 3.1 app) and I've done tons of mapping with it. To this date, I still have yet to find a replacement for it that is as feature packed, but lightweight... And inexpensive. PhotoFinish 4 is a totally different monster. :{ PhotoFinish 3 does not work on XP, 2000, Vista or anything newer even with the compatibility setting.

Anyway, I prefer to spend my 3D time doing stuff that I like doing and most of it being illustrations and such. This is also if I dont spend a lot of time programming since there are VERY few website solutions geared towards RPG sites, especially the "nuke" portals. Of course this has to be balanced between work, and other stuff. :{ Sometimes I wish we had more hours to a day.

Thanks for the welcome. :}


RPMiller:
I've seen his posts around as well as him discussing his large format scanners.

The one map I have isnt too big since it consists only of 3 8x11" pages and can easily fit in my scanner one page at a time. Now the other one is a totally different monster. I'm wanting to keep that one since it is used frequently but I'm also working into digitizing it with CC2. I'd hate to see an image file thats 5 feet by 7 feet at print resolution on a computer. Its handy for wargaming so mailing it out will be a real bummer which is my main concern. :{ Its my only copy.

I've definately thought about contacting him and mailing off a few of my 11x17" maps also for one-shots. Nothing fancy, but they were fun.


pyrandon
Hehehehe... I like thinking outside the box a bit and even coin a new term if I can. If you use it, know where you heard it first. :p


Anyway... Thanks for the welcome once again. Here I'll show you all another map that was used in a game a few months ago whose concern was showing how a location was laid out. Not really too accurate, but it got the point across to how the place was setup. This image (and that domain) resides on a server located in my house, so its uptime will not be constant.

http://mgcjerry.net/school.gif

I believe your local Kinko's should have the ability to copy that large map even in sections if need be. If you wouldn't be too distraught about cutting it up you could probably cut it into long strips that would fit their scanner as well.

Just tossing out an option. I was mainly thinking that if you could get it scanned into an image you could then drop that image into CC2 and then trace over it which would probably save you a bunch of time. Image size shouldn't be an issue if you have the imaging software to resize it. IrFanView is a great solution in that regard as it is free.

Originally Posted by MGCJerry

Anyway... Thanks for the welcome once again. Here I'll show you all another map that was used in a game a few months ago whose concern was showing how a location was laid out. Not really too accurate, but it got the point across to how the place was setup. This image (and that domain) resides on a server located in my house, so its uptime will not be constant.

http://mgcjerry.net/school.gif

I'm guessing that was done in MS Paint?

Originally Posted by MGCJerry

This is also if I dont spend a lot of time programming since there are VERY few website solutions geared towards RPG sites, especially the "nuke" portals. Of course this has to be balanced between work, and other stuff. :{ Sometimes I wish we had more hours to a day.

Thanks for the welcome. :}

Welcome aboard! I didn't quite follow your comment on website solutions...what do you mean? (I've done a bit of PHP and plugin work for S9Y so am always looking for dabble ideas)...

Anyhow, wrt the big map, ever thought of taking a bunch of pictures with a digital camera and stitching them together using something like Hugin? If it will stitch together a 9000x3000 panoramic photo from 15 hand-held and randomly snapped shots (speaking from experience) then it should be able to stitch your 5'x7' at something like 120dpi from photo's, no problem. It will also do parallax and perspective correction and such. (of course it can also stitch multiple images from a small scanner, too)


Lastly - you have a Cobalt RaQ at home? Cool.

-Rob A>