My first map

[Koor]

Ok, my friend and I are working on a campaign, and I really got into the worldbuilding process. He drew out a simple handdrawn map and I fleshed it out in CC3. I created the map at the world level, and made it HUGE (6000x4800) so that I could create all the way down to the small details and have them on one giant map. I could then zoom in on those countries and print those off as accurate country maps.. complete with cities and towns.. and other landmarks.

Here's the first one:
Designed to be used by the DM and with max detail.. too much detail for any cartographer to have seen in a campaign world. I sent it to the DM at 6000x4800, whereas the resolution you are seeing is merely 1800x1200
No names have yet been placed on the DM's map, as those details haven't truly been hammered out yet, only the country names, and I was kinda sick of messing with CC3 for the time being.

The small island on the bottom left near the scale can be zoomed in to this on the DM's 6000x4800 map:



And furthermore, I created a map for the Players to see. One that would have far less detail than the DM's, but hopefully still be interesting. The map would probably come into their possession in a manner of the DM's choosing. I simply took the 6000x4800 png ran it through photoshop with the photocopy filter with a few tweaks, laid it onto a preexisting background stationary, and did a color blending of it. It came out alright, though the photocopying made some pixelated lines and such.. I'd thought to try charcoal and chalk but that didn't work well, nor did conte crayon. So I simply ended up blending what I could of this. I also went through and gave the map some character with some nifty fonts I got from www.dafont.com (the piratey font for the word "Greana" is "Rapscallion", the other country names are done with "Black Adder" and the bloodstains are the font .. dang forgot what it was. I also used various handwriting fonts for penciled in details on the map).



My biggest problem with all of this is the Player map. During the process of converting from the CC3 map to what I hoped would appear to be somewhat of a hand drawn map, the process seems to have let the light color rivers disappear, since on the CC3 map they are lighter color than the land around them.[/img]

[RPMiller]

You have some really interesting stuff going on there. I think with the player map, you might be better off doing symbol swamps to the hand drawn styles and changing line types. It is a bit "jarring" as a supposedly hand drawn map. Too many clean lines and such. Plus as you mentioned no one would know this much detail. Perhaps you can do some cuts and leave just the area of the map that a local cartographer would have drawn?

[Robbie]

Looks pretty awesome actually...there's a few things I'd work on though...I'd go into your bitmap fill styles (the ones that are pixellated) and uncheck the scale checkbox...that way the images will always appear full res no matter what zoom you're in. This works great with overland maps anyways. Also, if you can switch the fill style to the vh equivalent of whatever you have chosen.

I REALLY like what you've done with the hand drawn style conversion. perhaps you could hide everything but the rivers and change their color to black and do a quick save...then undo back to normal...and then adjust the color of just the rivers you saved and overlay it on the player map you have there?

[heruca]

Nice job. I especially like the little touches on the Player's map, like the bloodstains and the "handwritten" notes.

[Koor]

Ok, so after a long time of having this shelved, I broke it out to toy around.

I tried scaling, and after saving it again I discovered that the pixelation appears from converting the .FCW to .jpg. So it looks like the only answer might be just photoshop touch ups.

Unfortunately, my laptop which has cc3 on, has only gimp, not photoshop.. and I have no clue how to use gimp in even the simplest functions.

[RPMiller]

Actually before you go to that extreme try exporting as a png instead. You may discover that you have no pixelation. Trust me, PNGs are the only way to go, at least for this type of picture.

[Eru]

Man, I really like the fact that you've taken the time to create both a GM version as well as a player version. The player version is awesome and would definitely get me in the mood to game. I also like the "piratey" feel to the map - all maps would be piratey if I had my way: fantasy, sci-fi, real life....

Aaaaarrrr! <making hook with fingers>