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For best results, 50 px for "5 foot" square or some higher factor of that is best. Most people make their maps using 100, 150, or even 200px per 5 foot section.Originally Posted by industrygothica
Joe
Image size & resolution
Maybe this has been asked and answered here before, but I can't find it if it has...
I'm not interested in using a VTT for a direct connection to my players, but more to load premade photoshop maps so that I can maneuver the tokens and whatnot, and then export a screenshot to EN World.
The question I have is about resolution... dpi, ppi, csi, fbi, whatever; is there a minimum screen size/resolution that is considered standard? Basically I'd like to make a custom preset size in photoshop that I can just open and start drawing.
Thanks in advance.
-IG
For best results, 50 px for "5 foot" square or some higher factor of that is best. Most people make their maps using 100, 150, or even 200px per 5 foot section.
Joe
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Bah.. good thing my wife's a math teacher!
Here's a breakdown of the steps I use to set my canvas size.
* Make a sketch and estimate a scale for it.
* From the sketch, determine the total width in feet of the area I'll be mapping.
* Pick a pixel-foot scale. For VTT battlemats, that would be on the order of 20 - 40 pixels / foot.
* Multiply the number of feet by the number of pixels in each foot. (A 75' X 125' battlemat at 40px / foot gives an images resolution of 3000 X 5000.)
* Evaluate whether the target resolution seems appropriate and/or useable. If it's too big, adjust the pixels / foot downward. If it's rather small, adjust pixels / foot upward.
If you're designing only for VTTs, dpi settings don't matter at all--you can safely ignore that field.
Last edited by Midgardsormr; 06-28-2008 at 08:51 PM. Reason: Adjusted numbers for more desirable VTT resolution.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
Thanks guys - I really appreciate your help.
See, that's why I love this site. I know I can ask a question and get at least a couple of good answers fairly quickly. You guys rock.
-IG
I read the Dunjinni forums for pointers there. If I remember rightly, they all seem to prefer 200px per 5 foot when doing encounter maps, but will settle for 100 or 150. For city or regional maps I don't know though, maybe in the CC3 website forums.
That'd be 40 px / foot, then. I'll adjust my earlier advice to suit.
Incidentally, as Gamerprinter pointed out some months ago, if you design at 200 px / 5 feet, 200 dpi, and a printed scale of 1" = 5 feet, your printed image res and VTT image res are identical.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
ooooo... 200px/5' and 200dpi equal to 1"=5' is a very very handy little tip ... thanks for pointing that piece of info out ... and thanks to GP for all his industrious work for printed battle maps and ratios of screen to print .... I love you guys
Just in case you havent seen this thread...
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=994
50px per 5 foot works fine in maptool, but then that's for practical issues which include sending it remotely - which you don't need to worry about. If you just want it for taking screenshots, then figure out the smallest area you'd want a screenshot of - say a 40' wide area - then make sure your image looks good at that resolution on your screen. I'd guess that for an ENworld screenshot you don't want to go to anything wider than 1000px, so that would give you a base resolution of 1000/40=25px per 5 feet. If you wantt o take a screenshot where the map shows something 20' wide then make sure your map looks good at 50px/5'. Any detail above this is only useful if you wnat to zoom in on a single square, or small group of squares. Nice for players within a VTT, but not really an issue if you're the one deciding what gets captured in a screenshot.
On a side note - maptool has 'export as player' and 'export as GM' functions, as well as the ability to place grid reference numbers along both sides of the map. Handy for pbp games, ig this is the use you are putting it to.
