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Thread: "Frilled" sea borders

  1. #1
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    Default "Frilled" sea borders

    I'm in the process of making some maps for my GURPS fantasy campaign and, being the lazy person I am, I'm ripping the map style from a map of Tamriel, the continent from the Elder Scrolls games. The map can be found here : http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:TamrielMap.jpg

    My question is, how do I make coastline with the kind of "frills" seen on this map?

    I am a bit of newbie and using GIMP.

  2. #2

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    How weird, I've just today done a map for someone who asked for a map based on the same picture. Go to this thread to see what I arrived at. To get the frilled effect I drew a few vertical lines with the same proportional length and spacing as the frill lines on a piece of paper with a black pen, scanned them in and saved them as a brush (you could probably just draw a few vertical lines in Gimp, come to think of it) and use those for your brush. I used a vector program which has raster effects and the brushes work differently, and I don't use gimp, but the settings you need for your brush will be that the brush pattern stays 90 degrees to the angle of the line and you might want some size jitter in there as well. Then it's just a matter of stroking the outline of the continent with the brush.

    If you're a new with Gimp, you may need to wait for one of the gimp users to come along and explain it better!

  3. #3
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    Thanks for the information! Huh, apparently the Elder Scrolls are popular around here...

    I have yet to master most of GIMP's techniques, but it seems like a good idea, using a special brush and simply tracing along the coastline. Alas, I really don't yet know how to make a brush and so forth...

  4. #4
    Community Leader Guild Sponsor Gidde's Avatar
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    That rotating-along-a-line brush may be difficult to do in Gimp. Do you have inkscape? I think a vector program may be better at it. Although I believe RobA did a rotating brush script, but I'm not sure if it will trace a path that way.

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    I do have inkscape in fact, but I'm also quite inexperienced in it. Is there any way to make "quick convert" of a black and white map outline (what I have made this far in GIMP) to a vector?

  6. #6

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    Inkscape has a 'trace bitmap' script, I think (sorry don't use Inkscape). Your best bet would be to fill the outline with black and trace it in inkscape which will give you a vector product. If you find it all too difficult, why don't you just post a high res copy of the outline here and I'll do it for you and put in the frilled edges as well.

    Of course (old fashioned as it sounds) you could always print out a copy of your outline and do the frills by hand with a black pen. That would probably give you the nicest looking result and would probably be faster than spending time trying to figure out how to do it in Gimp / Inkscape.

    best

    Ravs

  7. #7
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    If you would like to do so, it would be terrific! I have the outline of the map here, but I don't know if I have actually made it in far too small a resolution.

    cheers

    Legiazus
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  8. #8

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    Hi Legiazus, the resolution is fine. I've attached it here as an SVG file. There are two layers. Layer 1 is the continent in vector (lol, I hope I've guessed the sea and land right!), there are 14 objects in layer 1 for each enclosed landmass. Layer 2 has about 6,000 objects in it, and they are the frill lines. You may need to do some cleaning up which is pretty straightforward - open the image in inkscape, ungroup layer 2 and then delete / rotate the fill lines you want to edit. Because the images are in vector you can scale them as big as you like and they will still remain sharp.
    Attached Files Attached Files

  9. #9
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    Thanks, I really appreciate that! And great to have the outline as a vector as well! And yes, you were correct about what was land and what was sea

    If it is not too much trouble, could you create another with more spacing between the frill? My inkscape seem to have some trouble with the layers in the file.

    Thanks again
    Legiazus

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