Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
At the cost of the "cartoony" appearance (as you put it), the advantage to the CC3 style is that the maps are very clean and clear (easy to read). You have displayed your art/creativity in the city's design/layout, which, IMO, is very nice. To quote the rep header, "I approve."
Regarding the problems with the path (though you aptly solved it in this case), as you cannot drag the end of the path off the edge of the image, I wonder if adjusting the "cap style" might have solved the problem as well. (It may not have, just a matter of curiousity for me.)
Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. -Voltaire
Adjusting the cap style also fixed it.Originally Posted by Feralspirit
Another thing I found in tinkering around with it is that if you manually set the page size to something smaller than the whole image, it also fixes it. Essentially, you're cropping the image natively in Inkscape (as opposed to exporting it and then cropping it in GIMP).
I've included an un-cropped version of the map, in case anyone was curious as to what I am doing.
The simple clarity of this map would be welcomed by any RPG player...
I really enjoy how the "background stuff" (ie. farmer's fields, roads, etc) is subtly faded out while the buildings, rivers, and trees remain in focus. That gives me something to consider when making my own maps. I've often wondered how to affect the readability of my maps versus the overall illustrative look.
Nice job! Have some rep.
Joshua
Graphic Designer
& Amateur Photoshop Cartographer
Thanks.Originally Posted by Joshua_101
Unfortunately, I don't think I can attach the SVG itself, but I can tell you a little of what I did. The roads all have a 3% blur applied to them. The main roads are 12 px wide, while the city roads are all 8 px. I didn't do too much tinkering with these, just until I found a setting that made their hard edges indistinct.
The fields all have a 2% blur applied to them. I messed with this one a bit before I found a number I liked. They are, of course, three different colors; honestly I need to go and mess with the lightest green because I think it's too similar to the background green.
The river is two layers, a darker blue on the bottom, and a lighter blue with a 0.5% blur on top. Getting this one to work right was a happy accident; if I remember correctly, I was originally playing with transparency and blur, and went to work on the lower river because one of the curves wasn't lined up, and when I switched which path was on top, viola.
And the trees... those were two pieces, the canopy and the trunk, which I grouped and then copied and pasted. Over. And over. And over. Each one of those trees is hand-placed. Honestly, I'd like to go back and mess with them now, but I would have to do it to each of them individually (messing with the overall stroke would mess with both the stroke around the canopy and the trunk). When I was placing them, every now and again, I'd move one to a level or two higher so it wasn't so monotonous.