Scales

[Leondegrance]

I've been mucking about with CC3/DD3 and am eagerly awaiting CD3, but I have a major problem with maintaining realistic scale across the board.

I was wondering if anyone had any tips or tricks for maintaining a realistic scale when making overland, city and floorplan maps. ie realistic distance, houses that are a realistic size in relation to road width and so on.

I realise this is probably just a conceptual problem in my own head, but if anyone has any suggestions or has over come this problem themselves, I'd love to hear about it!

[ravells]

The reality is that if you are drawing objects to scale houses are very small. streets are very narrow and trees are really high, so much so that when drawing fantasy maps one usually throws scale out of the window and increases the size of houses and streets to get a more 'artistic' outcome. Not sure if this helps, but if you are after what scale is like, just use google earth and use the scale there as a guide.

welcome to the Guild, by the way!

[Leondegrance]

I get what you're saying, and I suppose it doesn't matter all that much in terms of what I'm doing. It's just i see all the fantastic maps here that look perfectly to scale across the board, and I'm just wondering if broaching this is the next step in improving my mapping.

Part of my problem is biting off more than I can chew aswell, I make these maps that represent a massive area, and then try to jam too much in to it. I think i need to play around with small county/village area size maps first.

I'm looking forward to CD3, I'll try to approach it with a more open mind with regard to scale and see how i go!

[ravells]

I find Profantasy products are a curate's egg. It's very easy to use the symbols to create a bog standard map, which has only the personality of the person who created the symbols and none of your own. My only caution is that if you want to use CD3, you should have in mind an objective first and then use the software to achieve it, rather than taking short cuts with symbol use.

The difficulties in creating a good looking fantasy map are less to do with scale but more to do with learning basic principles of art, like understanding how to use colour to convey an emotion, using the a coherent scale of tone and hue and the basics of composition. Get those and the maps will look good.

Your best bet will be to post some of your maps here so people can comment on them. It improved my mapping no end and I'm sure it will yours.

[Steel General]

Your best bet will be to post some of your maps here so people can comment on them it improved my mapping no end and I'm sure it will yours.

I can't agree enough with this, the comments, critiques, and suggestions that you get here will go along way to improving your maps. So post often!

[Ascension]

I can't help ya with CC3 since I only use Photoshop, but I always keep in mind exactly what I want my scale to be and then make sure everything fits into that scale. When I do a continent I will usually have the scale be 1 pixel = 1 mile or 1/2 mile, when I do a city I will have the scale be 1 pixel = 1 foot or 1/2 foot. So if I want a 50 foot wide house I already know how many pixels it should be. So that's how I start, what does 1 pixel represent? The other thing to keep in mind with CC3 is that if you download a lot of user created art they are not always in proper scale so that might be throwing ya off as well.

[Redrobes]

I've been mucking about with CC3/DD3 and am eagerly awaiting CD3, but I have a major problem with maintaining realistic scale across the board.

I was wondering if anyone had any tips or tricks for maintaining a realistic scale when making overland, city and floor plan maps. ie realistic distance, houses that are a realistic size in relation to road width and so on.

I write and use ViewingDale which is a mapping program which works at no fixed scale because it is a zoom browser type application. When you add a house to the map it places it down at the exact scale it should be for that map. You do not have to stretch every tree and widget to make it fit all the time like you might have to when doing it with a raster paint package like PS or Gimp. You can put sections of map into another map and it will also be at correct scale even when the scales of the pieces are wildly different - such as placing a town in a continent.

We have all been mapping our community world ( the CWBP ) and these are made of tiles of approximately 600 miles square and the fairly large cities in these tiles work out as a pixel or two when the tile fills the screen. There are huge differences in scale from world mapping to city.

The best thread to show how this is being combated using the program can be found here.

Getting stuff with correct scale is a non issue for me now though I seem to be in a minority of people who use it.