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
Just in case you havent seen this thread...
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=994