After-WIP: A distant planet (or how I did my orthophotographic map of Dune)

[Bretton]

Hi guild,

Some days ago I posted this thread on the Finished maps section. What follows is a kind of WIP description of the steps I followed to get to the results; hope it may be interesting to someone here.

So the map was intended for a board game, and this is what I posted the other day. But the before designing the board, I had to draw the map on which the game was going to develop.

Now when I started this project, there were already some board games on Frank Herbert's Dune, some pretty good, like the old Avalon Hill's edition. And there were some redesigns, too, some of them beautiful and well designed. I wanted to honor all this material, and took it as my starting point.

Some images to give you an idea:



This was one of my favorite redesigns.



Can't say the same about this one, but it has the original graphics of the Avalon Hill edition on it.

After some work I realised something that was really a problem to me: the graphics and arrangement of the elements used for the map on this boardgames did not fit Frank Herbert's drawn map of Dune! (At least in my edition):



A photo of Frank Herbert's map of Dune in my Spanish edition. If you take some time comparing it to the layout of the previous board games, you will see they don't fit.

So I decided to start all over again and work only on the author's drawing. First step should be tracing it, then.






And this was the results. I did it with CAD software as I wanted to have it as layered vector graphics.


Having a geometry true to F. Herbert's original, I was now faced with the task of finding a texture to fit it in. So I searched our own planet's surface seeking for desert regions so I could use them for my map. Travelling this way was a real pleasure.



An example of the orthophotos I selected for my map, using Google Earth.


After collecting all the material needed, I just combined and merged it all into a photoshop file fiting it into the previously traced geometry. And this was the result:




That done, the hardest part of the work was over. The rest was just labelling, and the map was finished:




The map is labelled in four different languages: Spanish, Fremen, Galach and Imperial, using fan-made fonts based upon graphics as seen on the books, comics and movies. Brown lines are regional borders, while blue lines represent the main roads. This information was common to "the map" an "the board".

Last step was adding all the graphics needed for game play: victory points tracks, player aids, counter pools, etc. Which I added as a king of "window frame" 'cos I liked to imagine the board to be a panoramic view of the planet's surface from a spaceship:



And after addind the missing info, this was the end result:



As said, hope this might be useful to someone. And hope you like it at least!