Sep/Oct Lite Entry - Relleker: Recreational Wilderness

[Jeff_Wilson63]

I decided to enter this map in the this months challenge. It's sort of borderline to the theme, but since Relleker is encouraging hunting, camping, other forms of "outdoor recreation" I figured I might as well go for it.

### LATEST WIP ###

As I mentioned in another thread, I have a false color shaded elevation map of a real-world area (from USGS data). To reach this point:

1) I re-scaled the original map to 100m per pixel.
2) Created an emboss using the standard GIMP settings.
3) Layered the color map over the emboss with 50% opacity.

I am amazed at how well this simple process worked. IMO it gives a very "turn of the century" feel which is very appropriate for the steampunk world this map is for. My only hesitation at this point is that I might not be able to do the rest of the map with a similar quality.

[Avulsion]

It's SUPER detailed. So, I think you're right that it will be hard to match that quality with your customizations. Perhaps you could crop it to an area you like most, and then somehow reduce the overall detail to something more manageable?

This may sound like bad advice, so you should get a second opinion... hehe.

[Ashenvale]

It's breathtakingly beautiful! I promptly copied it to my file of maps to review when seeking inspiration.

What I'd love to see is a window within the overall image (or set off to the side if you don't want to obscure part of what you have) zooming in on and enlarging a small area from somewhere on your overall map. Within that window, you could show off embellishments without them become lost because of scale.

Some tags would also be nice!

[Ascension]

So is this DEM data or something that you then applied a gradient to? Interesting.

[Jeff_Wilson63]

The original data was DEM. Someone else created the original bump map and applied the gradient and shadowing (which probably has a technical term I don't know) before I got it.

[Jeff_Wilson63]

Since my last update I've placed the county borders, trimmed out the bottom part of the map I don't need, and added a scale and an empty cartouche.

Unfortunately I can't get this map to upload. The link is
http://www.monticello21st.com/uploads/nf_relleker.jpg and I'll up the compression on the next version.

The county borders are on paths and a separate layer so I can play with the best way to display them. I'm also not sure about the best way to display the county names. Once I decide on a font that's going to take some serious experimentation.

I created the scale in raw SVG. ( http://www.monticello21st.com/uploads/Scale.svg ). The top half marks out 10km increments. The bottom half marks out 5 mile increments. There were some problems importing it into GIMP. Hopefully I can find a "no antialias" svg command to fix the last one remaining.

Any advice or feedback would be appreciated. Next up is lakes and towns.

[RobA]

I created the scale in raw SVG. ( http://www.monticello21st.com/uploads/Scale.svg ). The top half marks out 10km increments. The bottom half marks out 5 mile increments. There were some problems importing it into GIMP. Hopefully I can find a "no antialias" svg command to fix the last one remaining.

First off, I would suggest exporting from Inkscape as a PNG and import that into Gimp as a layer, since Inkscape has better SVG rendering than Gimp.

Second - you probably have a subpixel alignment problem. From the FAQ

How to suppress antialiasing?
With the current renderer, it is not possible to completely get rid of antialiasing. However, it is possible to partially suppress it on export. Usually, antialiasing is unwelcome in horizontal and vertical lines which become "blurred". To work around this, make sure your horizontal/vertical edges are snapped on the pixel grid, and all strokes are a whole number of pixels wide. Then, export bitmap at the default 90dpi so that 1 px unit corresponds to 1 bitmap pixel. In the resulting bitmap, snapped color boundaries will be perfectly crisp.

Here is a nice description at Inkscape Forum.

Now both of these say to set the grid and snap to it....but you already have an image, so check out the pixelsnap extension:

When you create vector graphics in Inkscape, horizontal & vertical lines and rectangles will usually appear slightly blurry, due to edges not being aligned perfectly with screen pixels.
<snip>big discription of how to manually work around with grids as above</snip>
With this plugin, the whole thing is a simple case of running Extensions->PixelSnap on the selected objects.

Hope this is useful.

-Rob A>

[Jeff_Wilson63]

Well, for the scale, the command that's supposed to do what I want is

style="shape-rendering:crispEdges"

Unfortunately, neither GIMP nor Inkscape understand it. I was finally able to get something that looked close to what I wanted by shifting the viewBox half a pixel.

viewBox="0.5 0.5 550 80"

This still created some unintended effects as GIMP interprets half pixels differently in different locations. I may go back later and rewrite everything to display properly in GIMP, but right now I'm inclined to look at the problem as being with GIMP.

Also note that GIMP ignores svg width and height parameters. To properly open this image in GIMP you need to manually set ppi to 72.

http://www.monticello21st.com/uploads/Scale.svg

[Jeff_Wilson63]

I finally figured out how to do the scale. If I import the svg as paths and then manually do all the grouping, stroking, and filling that's already in the file (including the antialias off instruction) I get exactly what I wanted. It seems a bit bass-ackward, but it works.