I am also new!

[Gowienczyk]

Hello, there or something! I IS NEW GUIZ. I'm Mike, I've been doing this roleplaying thing for 7 years at best and mapmaking I guess maybe 5 or 4. Though, really my first maps were paint jobs with no real artistic value; purely some imagery to go on with the story. I've currently been working on a few campaigns on my Sathis world, which entails several details of Tromania and watnot. I found a place on EN or some other website and they namedropped this site and I'm glad that's the case. So much I can learn from here; even if I do my maps in Adobe/Macromedia Flash Pro, while most of you are akin to Photoshop or GIMP from my understanding. But yeah, I was wondering if I could access any tips, advice or hell any comments watsoever. I couldn't really figure how to bring forests to life on the map so I didn't paint them on there. Mountains were resized several times before I was happy. Those lighter liens are ****ty territorial/county borders I made, not rivers.

Heres a map in question: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y20...04/Sathis3.png

I have a intereactive version here: http://mike1204.deviantart.com/art/S...-0-A-102333489

Feel free to say hello, give a comment or whatever.

I think I'll like it here.

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

NeonKnight or someone will be along eventually to banish your 'Blue Pip of Shame' - more about that later.

Interesting maps - I couldn't view the interactive one (Firefox or my ISP was being a pain-in-the-posterior) but the other one was nicely done - simple, nice color scheme, just wish I could've zoomed-in a bit more.

As for tips, etc. depends on how you want your maps to appear. Folks here all have their own tastes and styles so give us an idea on what you're looking to do and I'm sure some one will speak-up.

You may want to create a thread for your stuff in one of the WIP forums - rather than posting them here.

[Gowienczyk]

Fair enough. A lot of my maps usually take the same smooth style, I think. I like to use flash and I've always preferred it's undo feature (among other things) to photoshop so it's a bit harder to do some of the more interesting thing I've seen the photoshop mappers do. Right now I want to figure on how to make rivers look nicely on my map (which is obvious as there are no real rivers outside of the Dracori Marsh/Delta). I also want to figure out how to make forests look better on this map. I tried using icons and it just didn't sit right with me; I tried making a solid color section akin to the desert scheme, but that didn't work either. I also, wanted the mountains to be different but I'll live with them how they are.

Haha, I'm not even too fond of the city markers. I loved my lineart, color schemes and 'railroad' trail quite a bit. Not so much on paths, but I think they are necessary.

My banter is a bit of a mouthful, I'm sure.

But basically I want to improve in my flash mapmaking overall when it comes to everything but the lineart, scheme and mountains. Hm. But thanks for the welcome. Yeah, the PNG is a bit distant and zooming in would be nice - but that's why I always put .swf versions on my deviantART, I think. In case people want to zoom and explore.

Heh.

[Redrobes]

Hello Mike, Nice political borders on your maps there

Welcome, im sure you will gets lots of good comments around here.

[Gowienczyk]

Hello Mike, Nice political borders on your maps there

Welcome, im sure you will gets lots of good comments around here.

I think they are quite sloppy, personally! Haha.

Sounds like a plan.

[jfrazierjr]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Midgardsormr]

Welcome!

First thing: Take a look at Fogdown in the Cartographer's Choice board. Redstar created that map in Flash and then did a little bit of post-work in Photoshop. It's a superb example of what can be done with Flash.

Your maps are extremely low-contrast. I had to turn the contrast setting on my monitor down in order to see them at all (which is probably a good thing on my part, since I didn't realize it was up so high). It looks almost as though you've turned the opacity of the entire image down, graying it out.

Now, using a vector program like Flash gives you a big advantage in the ability to zoom in as much as you want, but I think you should choose the zoom-level you want the maps to be viewed in and design the icons and labels for that scale. As it stands, the mountains are tiny, and the labels and glyphs (very nice, by the way) are enormous. I zoomed in twice and found that level to be comfortable.

There's a huge amount of whitespace. I'd drop the titles at the top, since you've also got the continents labeled, and crop it in to leave no more than 30% of the vertical "page" as whitespace. 20% would be better.

Concerning the borders, I think the way they're drawn in is fine. You might vary the shade of each country slightly to make it more obvious what the lines represent. We're used to seeing those political maps where each country is a different color, so I think that would improve the sense that there are multiple nations on each continent.

Very nice work, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you come up with! As you experiment, be sure to post some tips on using Flash for cartography--we don't see very many maps made with it.

[NeonKnight]

Yes Welcome to the Guild! I hereby Banish the BLUE PIP 'o' SHAME and make it all nice and green!

*Steel General, You can also banish the blue pip if yuou are here first

[ravells]

Welcome to the guild! I think you're going to become our resident Flash expert!

Enjoy your stay at the site!

[jezelf]

Welcome! - great looking maps love the clean style, fonts icongraphy. The only comments I have on them is they are very pale not making it easy on the eye to read (takes a bit of adjustment ) and wish they were bigger for me to pour over, so subjective things really.

good to have you here!

cheers
jez