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Thread: [WIP] Zanannia and environs

  1. #1
    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    Wip [WIP] Zanannia and environs

    Here's what I would propose as Zanannia, per the Request for a political map of Zanannia. I'll show what I'm doing as I go - not terribly sophisticated, but hey, I like my results :-). I'll refer to the original poster as Zann, and the nation as Zanannia, to keep things straight in my small brain. A request - what's the full name of the nation, or the nation type, by which it could be formally labeled? Such as The Democratic Despotism of Zanannia - that sort of thing. This is a Fractal Terrains basemap, but I just used FT to gen the shape. Regenerate random world, regen, regen, regen - whoa, there's an island I can start with. Push, prod, poke, raise, smooth... ehhh, Okay. If the islands don't seem far enough away, just say so.


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    Yes, the OP asks for a political map. This is topo... it's how I think. This won't be a bunch of western-USA arbitrary straight lines - I'll use the topography to come up with something more organic for district borders. The rivers as shown are just the rough ones FT generated with no effort ... I count them as suggestions :-). They're on their own layer, so I'll mod, trace, and supplement them. The end result will be plainer political , with a matching topo if you want it, Zann. I'll probably snug the islands up next to the mainland, with a small inset showing their true relationship.

    I greatly simplified the continental shelf that FT gave me. Since I'm not maintaining the Full Grand Fractalness of it all, I'm also modding the topography as I see fit.

  2. #2
    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    When I use this style, I like a crisp coastline. There's an easy 'find all edges' in PhotoPlus, BUT recent versions do a "nice" aliased boundary. I don't think I want that, here -- so I usually drop back to an old version I keep just for the binary on-or-off edge detection. If I have all major lakes decided early, it's good to use this step to draw their coasts too. Then I did a little manual mountain tweaking, suggesting the incising of valleys from water flow. Then I connected the dots and wiggled some plausible rivers into place.

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    This is probably as much or more topo info than Zann wanted, so I'll quit fiddling with it and move on to politics and people.

  3. #3

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    This looks great so far! The islands are about as far out as I wanted them!

    For more information on Zanannia, here's my factbook!

    http://forum.nationstates.net/viewto...p?f=23&t=87832

    Also, I see the idea, you want to make a topographical map so that the political map looks better. Sure, you can go ahead and take the topo and finish it. That would be a lovely addition to my factbook!

  4. #4
    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    Good. This is how I placed the district boundaries - ridgelines, rivers, common-terrain or presumably common climate.

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    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    And here's what I'll use for the political basemap. I tried it with fully-shaded districts, but this wound up looking better to me, with the 'inner glow' coloring.

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    That's fifteen districts -- the three southwest yellow-border bits are all one district, just discontinuous -- the nearby yellow islands too, for that matter.

    Now I have a couple of decisions to make. A benefit of the .gif / pixel-crisp style is ai can use really tiny fonts and nevertheless have them legible. But having read the label placement treatise Ravells posted, I want to try following some of those rules. Think, think, think. Pixel fonts go all blurry when tilted or curved.... anti-aliased if you want it, blurred if you don't ;-). If I'm going to permit any antialiasing at all I might as well go .jpg or .png, because the in-between colors will eat .gif's 256 palette Really Quickly.

    Maybe I'll try both ways, and others as well ;-). There's no decision like No Decision.

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    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    Oh, and thanks for the Factbook pointer. I don't mind conforming to preset worldbuilding ... that doesn't so much cramp my creativity, as spur it on. After all, rationalization can take more thinking than simply letting "reality" happen :-).

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    Guild Expert jbgibson's Avatar
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    Well, there's one way to label districts. Do the curves look OK? Is there any commentary or criticism in general?

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    Next for some cities...

    Don't know how much of this I'll add to on Monday -- it's snowing in North Alabama, which it almost NEVER does. It was actually thundersnow earlier! Fun stuff :-). Four to six inches is a mere snow shower in some places, but my kids will be nuts, come daylight.
    Last edited by jbgibson; 01-10-2011 at 01:51 AM.

  8. #8
    Guild Adept moutarde's Avatar
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    I would suggest trying to avoid having any letters that are turned more than 180 degrees. Vaca Ligeria for example - I feel like I have to turn my head to read it, because the Vaca is closer to upside down than right side up. Other than the few labels like that, I think you're looking pretty sweet!

  9. #9

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    Yeah, I agree, I had to turn my head to read some of them!

    Also, to avoid confusion, could you merge the two smaller Tripecian regions into Niropa?

    Other than this, it looks fantastic! I absolutely love it!

  10. #10

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    I also love all the names! They are awesome!

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