VTT maps are usually 1 square = 5'. The number of pixels in each square can vary, but normal scales are 50px = 5' and 70px = 5'. If a map is 100'x100' then there are 20 squares on the scale and a 50px map will be a 1000x1000 image. A 70px map will be a 1400x1400 image.Originally Posted by mathuwm
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mathuwm,
This is a post from the challenge description. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...87&postcount=8
and my entry,
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1998
basically just add ### Latest WIP ### to the end of your post.
Right. Its the bit about inches that was confusing me. So its dots per 5ft then or dots per inch where an inch = 5ft. That makes more sense so mine is 40dp(5ft).
If you're not going to print, just ignore dpi. All it can do is confuse things.
Generally speaking, printing will require more resolution than a VTT, so if you're designing for both simultaneously, make your dpi setting a multiple of your pixel / unit scale, output your print version, then resample and output your screen version.
To illustrate, using the given numbers:
1 inch = 5 feet.
40 pixels = 5 feet.
Therefore, 40 pixels = 1 inch gives 40dpi, which is not enough for printing.
If you design at 160 dpi, though, then you know that once you're done, you can resample everything to 25% original resolution and get your 40px = 5 feet for the VTT.
A 24 X 32 inch battlemat will be 3840 X 5120 pixels and cover an imaginary area of 120 X 160 feet. (1 in = 5 ft = 160px)
Resampling for the screen at the desired scale will give a 960 X 1280 image covering an area of 120 X 160 feet. (40 px = 5 ft. Inches are irrelevant)
I hope that helps and I haven't obfuscated the matter further!
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
Midgard, this helps a lot. I think I live in a world where everything is reversed as my VTT is far far higher res than print. All the icons are more like vector than raster and are store w.r.t the map real size not a battle mat scale. I don't think about dpi at any stage until I get to print it at which point I usually just stab in 600dpi and scale 1:60 and let it render some huge file.
Say you were in Inkscape then. I don't know the app that well but I assumed that you enter all the vector stuff in at real world scaling and then when you come to print it you rasterize it for the printer at a chosen scale and dpi. I would imagine that you don't think about the dpi whilst mapping it.
Its all very curious and I sure as hell wouldn't want to scale down all my images before making the original map so that they were 160dpi. That feels very counter productive to me - sorta locks you into one scale because of the printer demands.
Well, by all means work at the highest resolution you expect to need. As you know, it's always better to scale down than up.
I haven't used Inkscape, but I am somewhat proficient with CorelDRAW. That app used a paper-shaped workspace and measured everything in relation to the print size. As long as you're still using standard font measurements, the "actual" size of your design is going to come into play one way or another.
Theoretically, though, you could work at whatever scale you want, and the app shouldn't ask you for resolution of any kind until it's time to print.
In CC, you actually do work in real-world units. Scaling is done at export or print.
Viewingdale is kind of its own animal, of course. The general guidelines that apply to raster applications don't necessarily work quite as well there. To be honest, I have a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around it as it relates to resolution.
We probably ought to move this conversation out of this challenge entry thread, though! Sorry for the threadjack, mathuwm.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
No problem it is an interesting conversation. I thought it was both humorous and enlightening
there are a lot of good posts out there but most of the commentary is in regard to file size
LOL
Hoping to clarify things a bit about what I meant when I stated "5 - 10 pixels per foot" for the contest...and hoping that it doesn't confuse things further.
Our (and I imagine most other) VTs will display images at a 1 image pixel = 1 screen pixel scale when the image first comes up. If course you can zoom in and out later, but that's the basic display mode. Therefore, if you have an image with 1280 X 1024 resolution it will exactly fill a 1280 X 1024 pixel screen. If you have a 1600 X 1200 screen, it will fill only a fraction of the screen etc. Dpi is meaningless as a standard measurement because different monitors with the same resolution can have widely varying screen sizes and therefore widely varying pixels per inch.
Suppose you want to represent a 20' wide street on the image. If you choose a 5 pixel = 1 foot scale, then the street would be represented as being 5 X 20 = 100 pixels wide. If you make the entire image at 1280 X 1024 pixel size, then it will cover an area equal to 1280/5
by 1024/5 = 256' X 204.8' on the imaginary area you are mapping.
The scale range was chosen because it allows tokens representing miniatures to be a reasonable size when displayed to scale.
I definitely think I'm going to have to make the dpi vs. ppi thread a sticky...
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