[Award Winner] Assorted tips and tricks

[TempyTheCleric]

I am positively in love with this thread! Thank you so much, everything you have posted has been incredibly helpful! Not to mention it has also made my tinkering in the map making world less frustrating!

[torstan]

Eric Quigley asked about labeling recently and that prompted me to think a little about how I actually go about labeling a map. Often it's the last thing to get done, but it's also the most important. A map without labels is just a pretty picture, it's not useful. So, it's worth taking some care getting labels right.

This is a photoshop tutorial, but these techniques are almost identical in Gimp.



Today I'll be covering labeling locations. So I won't be handling titles, terrain labels, rivers or any of that. Basically, if it's a place adventurers can pillage, this is how we'll label it.

1. The Font

Pick something easy to read. I know we all like Deutsche Gothic and Pieces of Eight, but save those fonts for your title. The labels should be in something clean and simple. Here I've used Cochin, which is a nice serifed font that's a little unusual so doesn't immediately scream 'Times New Roman' at the viewer. Use different font weights to designate different locations. You can also use different capitalization. For example, all caps for Capital Cities, small caps for other cities, and capitalized lower case for everything else. In the Character Dialog in Photoshop there's a small caps option, which is a great thing to know about.

2. Colour

Don't use pure black. This I learned the hard way after doing the Midgard maps for Wolfgang Baur and Open Design. Black may read well on the screen, but it doesn't always print well. Here I've used a deep saturated brown.

3. Placement

I try to line up labels centered on the icon if I can. However, if there's a lot of detail in the map, you want to move the label to the nearest uniform space. So, place the label over all forest, all plains, or all water. Try to avoid placing the text over a line, such as a forest edge, coastline or river. The line will mess up the lines of your text and make it hard to read.

4. A subtle glow

Flat text on a map looks, well, flat. I add a gentle glow to the text to help pull it out from the background. I've given two examples here - one that looks good, and one that looks terrible. The glow on Holgren is an outer glow, with blend mode set to Screen and opacity set to 75% and a size of 5px. It's a very light yellow. You can see that the hard edge makes this look a bit nasty. Basically the sharp edge of the glow is competing with the sharp edge of the text, rather than complementing it. On Tranton, the glow is identical, but it has a size of 20px. This smoothes out the glow and has the effect of gently nudging the text out of the background. It'll also knock out some of the background detail, making it easier to read a label above a more complicated piece of terrain. It's a powerful technique, but can easily be over used! Be careful - in this case less is usually more.

As always, throw any questions in the comments here and I'll do my best to answer them. Oh, and the map and icons are the Iconic Island.

Happy labeling!

[torstan]

Nikitas Thlimmenos was asking about how to place icons on a map, so here's the walkthrough! The map is the Iconic Island (Fantastic Maps - Iconic Island - Rite Publishing | Fantastic Maps | Tabletop Essentials | RPGNow.com) as that's the map Nikitas Thlimmenos is using. There's a bare base map in the pack, and all the .pngs come as separate files that you can add. But this also works if you find the CSUAC bundle of pngs or trawl the Dunjinni forums for the amazing art assets there. You can set dress a dungeon pretty quickly this way.



So, how do you add a .png icon to an existing map?

1. Open the map, and the objects, and copy

Here I've got Gimp open as a full screen app (Window->Single Window Mode). The tools palette is on the left. The layers palette is top right, and the brush palette bottom right. We're basically only going to be interested in the layers palette. You can see the three icons along the top? Those are the three files I've got open. Furthest left is the base island map, then there are two icon files. The open skull has a grey hatched background - that indicates a transparent area. With one of the icons open, select all (cmd/ctrl + A) and copy (cmd/ctrl + C).

2. Paste

Switch to the map view and paste (cmd/ctrl+V). Notice that in the top right you now have a new layer called Floating Selection? On the screen, the pasted element will be surrounded by black and white 'marching ants' showing that it's the selected element. Move the pasted element around (pick the move tool from the tools palette - it looks like the four pointed star - or press M). Move your mouse over the pasted icon and click and drag to move it around.

Once you're happy with the placement of the icon, under the layers palette click the new layer button (looks like a sheet of paper next to the folder icon under the list of layers). This will create a permanent layer for the icon. If you click he anchor instead, this would have embedded the icon in the base image - and that makes it much harder to edit later.

3. Add more icons

Now go and find a different icon to place. Select all, copy, go back to your working map, and paste. As before, move it around and click the new layer icon when you're happy. You should see something like the layers in the first image of step 3. Now you can see how this could get expensive in layers pretty fast. To keep this under control, you can merge layers as you go along. To do this, right-click the upper of the two layers you want to merge, click merge down, and the two layers will merge. You'll see that the black and yellow box gets larger. This is the boundary of the layer, and it increases in size to accomodate the new content.

4. Go Wild!

Here I've opened up all the icons. This way you can flick back and forth to find the icon you want, select-copy-paste into the map, and you'll have a fully iconed up map in no time.

I hope that gives you the tools to add icons and objects to your maps. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see about answering them. And if you pick up and use the Iconic Island, I'd love to see your results

[Doobyfrucan]

It's great to see so many resources in one place.

Thanks for all your effort in trying to help people advance their skills.

[aquarits]

yeah, probly is my favorite thread subscribed. Always checking before a work

[Endyr]

thank you so much for this thread! It is excellent and so great to see so many resources in one place. Also - I love your other site - Fantastic Maps. Excellent stuff Torstan.

[Pineapple]

Torstan thanks for being so generous with your time in putting together all of these tutorials. I just flipped through the site on my lunchbreak and bookmarked about 80 bajillion things to try.

[Meshon]

This is so fantastic. I've been meaning to thank you for awhile now, in general and also specifically for the color-jitter technique using a brush! I had no idea that was possible, it provides a great, controllable alternative to using 'clouds' all the time. Much obliged!

cheers,
Meshon

[torstan]

Thanks for all the kind words everyone - and apologies for the extended hiatus. Lots of changes in 2014. But, I've got a few more tutorials now. First up, a quick video walkthrough of the mountains I created in my Napa map:

[torstan]

Often hills are indicated on a map by drawing an outline, but when you have forest on top, that outline gets obscured. So how do you draw forested hills? The trick is to use the detail of the forest to indicate the hills, rather than obscure them.

It’s always useful to get some real world reference, even when doing line art maps. Here’s a satellite photo of the Trossachs – a forested region of hills in Scotland. Notice that it’s the density of hard shadows on the trees that tells you where the hills are in the forest.

1. Draw the outline of the forest and the hills (separate layers)

First, we need to know where everything is supposed to be. Draw the outline of your forest on one layer, and the outlines of your hills on another. If you’re using paper, use pencil for the hills and pen for the forest. We’ll be erasing the hard hill outlines later.

2. Add in the forest detail on the shaded side of the hills (on a new layer)

Here I’m taking the direction of light to be from the top left, so any side of the hill away from that is in the shade. By placing tree details (short curving lines) close together, those sides are darker, and will give a sense of the 3D terrain. The densest lines should be on the steepest edge of the hill, and on the side furthest from the sun (in my case – bottom right). Add similar details around the edge of the forest as well.

3. Erase the solid hill lines, and tidy up

Now remove the solid hill lines. It suddenly looks a lot better – your eye is reading the tree density as hill shadow, rather than relying on the lines!

After removing the lines, you’ll see areas that could take more detail. I’ve added some tree details around the top-left of the hill shapes, to complete the outline, and deepened the detail in the shadow to really make the hills pop out.

Long version here: http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2015/01...-top-down-map/