What do you think?
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
I got my money back of that friend of mine... and now, thanks to all the lovely examples uploaded to the forum I can't decide whether to get Character Artist, or Dungeon Designer!
I guess I have to decide whether I want the one reader (there's only one, bless him) who has promised to read my story to know what the characters look like, or the layout of the Sayer temple in Merelan!
I'm saving up as much of a surprise for him as possible, so I'm asking you for your thoughts on the matter to honour the "Top Secret" stamp on the front of my folder:-
If you were reading a great big dusty old fantasy novel, apart from the world maps, if the author could only afford to get one piece of software at a time, would you be more interested in the characters... or the layout of the Sayer temple (which is the size of the Vatican City) with its museum of monsters and all its fabulous mosaics... not forgetting the anamorphous messages they contain...
I have attached an image of "The Ambassadors" painted in 1533 by Hans Holbein the younger to illustrate what an anamorphous image is. The skull is only visible when you view the actual painting from the side. Originally this painting was hung on a stairway wall, so you could see the skull as you came up the stairs before turning the corner to carry on up the second flight.
EDIT: Of course, I could get City Designer instead, and map the detail of the cities?
I guess I have to decide whether I want the one reader (there's only one, bless him) who has promised to read my story to know what the characters look like, or the layout of the Sayer temple in Merelan!
I'm saving up as much of a surprise for him as possible, so I'm asking you for your thoughts on the matter to honour the "Top Secret" stamp on the front of my folder:-
If you were reading a great big dusty old fantasy novel, apart from the world maps, if the author could only afford to get one piece of software at a time, would you be more interested in the characters... or the layout of the Sayer temple (which is the size of the Vatican City) with its museum of monsters and all its fabulous mosaics... not forgetting the anamorphous messages they contain...
I have attached an image of "The Ambassadors" painted in 1533 by Hans Holbein the younger to illustrate what an anamorphous image is. The skull is only visible when you view the actual painting from the side. Originally this painting was hung on a stairway wall, so you could see the skull as you came up the stairs before turning the corner to carry on up the second flight.
EDIT: Of course, I could get City Designer instead, and map the detail of the cities?
Comments
Jerrosar had high cheek bones, a straight nose, a gull-wing brow and a well defined jaw. His piebald pattern… symmetrical either side of his ventral line… was as sharp and clear as the day it was formed; ebony and black on his upper and outer sides, and creamy gold-white on his inner and undersides. The paler shade of his hairless muzzle merged into the darkness below the solid gold of his eyes through a band of flowing dots and round-ended lines which flowed down the sides of his face. Aside from the hunter's blade that was strapped to his shin, he was clothed in nothing more than the silken black locks of his never-cut mane, and a long weighted loincloth of cobalt blue.
That stiff little passage is why I would want to cut it out from the rest (which it totally spoils) and draw a picture instead... but I still don't know what to do for the best.
This is a really difficult decision to make, since once I've done it I can't take it back. I'm not likely to be able to afford to buy anything other than food after that, until I publish the second book.
EDIT: This is another problematical passage of character description, where the two protagonists (Astra and Eonat) meet for the first time when Astra catches the boy as he is about to fall to his death from the wall of the temple. I'm wondering if this 'does it' for people who can visualise characters from description?
Astra pulled herself and the arm she was holding upwards by straightening her back with a drawn out grunt. She wasn’t as strong as an adult yet, but neither was Eonat as heavy as one.
The boy’s face was close to hers now, and in the beam of light she could see the pale oneness of his colour. He was a warm tan all over, and his trimmed but tousled hair was just a paler shade of it.
Astra stared into those strange discs that were his eyes – the black of night, set in pools of oceanic blue, and then in white - concentric rings. They weren’t… unattractive, but definitely not the kind of eyes she was used to staring into at point blank range… not that she’d spent any time staring into anyone’s eyes at such close range before now.
Her nostrils flared. This was as close as she had ever been to a creature that was ‘other’ than Zorrani, and the heat of Eonat’s body wafted up into her face.
He smelled different.
She could smell his fear, and the blood from his wound. In fact, at this range, she could more smell the things she knew about him than read them in his cluttered and ill-disciplined Blucran mind.
These Blucrans really were quite odorous, but there again, Eonat’s scent was nowhere near as offensive as the mingled stench of the unwashed crowd she walked among on a daily basis down on the flats. His scent was softer, more… cub like. Yes, that was it. He smelled like a cub – a lonely, frightened, and wounded cub.
And just like that, Astra’s waking senses switched into full protective adult mode. She blinked, and pulled Eonat up onto his one good leg on the peak of the buttress where it curved to meet the wall.
Campaign Cartographer
City Designer
Dungeon Designer
Character Artist
Edited: Also, i'm pretty sure if you are not satisfied with the product you can get refund....sooooooo......
I'm beginning to lean more in the direction of Dungeon Designer. I'll just have to live with the clunky character descriptions. After all, if I go and cut them out in favour of portraits drawn in Character Artist, anyone else who reads it without the benefit of a PC or a phone to refer to the graphics on the webpage... They aren't going to have the faintest idea what the characters actually look like.
I'm not going to act in haste, however. I'll see if anyone points anything out that I haven't thought about in the next couple of days
Kendra took a long look at her rescuer. She knew he was strong; she expected a tall, muscle bound, military type. What she saw gave her a bit of a shock. This man was tall, but not overly so, with a lanky, wiry build. He had an angular face, mid length, wavy black hair. And then she looked into his eyes…fell into them was more like it. His eyes were a flint, icy blue, almost silver… but there was an inner fire there; his eyes, burned and froze her on the spot, but she couldn’t look away.
But back to the question at hand. Character Artist or DD3? I would ask myself which add on I will use more. For me, specifically, because I'm currently mapping a campaign, which includes continents, regions, cities and towns, temples, dungeons and caves... I chose to purchase the cc3+/cd3/dd3 bundle when I purchased the software.
But I have a couple of novels that I'm currently writing too(when I have the alone time to do it!), In fact... I'm thinking about turning this campaign into a book... which means I will need the maps I'm creating for it as well. Most novels have maps for the story, but I have yet to see a novel that includes character images... unless those images are in the cover art.
Now, once I get this campaign ready to run, then I might go back and get Character Artist, so that I, and my players, can create images of their characters.
This one I posted 4 years ago in here.
I love to be able to trace along a path the story is taking, or to see what else is out there, whether it be one of those on the wall, works like Karen Wynn Fonstad, or even those on the inside covers of The Belariad, Shannara, and The Wheel of Time.
In my own works, I can't even get past an outline without having a map to show where we're going and what we're going to see between here and there.
For the people, for the most part, as the song says, people are people. I can google images if I really need to have a visual that is going to come closer to what I think the character should look like and not necessarily what the Author thinks. Same for places, I can make a collage of what it looks like based on the Author's layout.
So, uh, yea. Short story long, that's how my thought process works.
I'm afraid I didn't get that link. It was all about aerial photography? Very interesting - I'll give it that, but I think there may be a crossed wire in the hyperlink? Check. Me too. That's what I'm hoping to provide with the Errispan map - the route the expedition takes, along with the rest of the new world.
What you said about the characters though, made me feel kind of weird. But when I thought about it some more the truth is that all a writer does by the word is give the reader a shove in the right general direction. The true birth of a character happens in the spark of the reader's imagination, and the true appearance and nature of that character is thereafter a unique and secret product of the reader's own imagination - becoming his or her own property, to be drawn or depicted according to the reader's dream of what the author really meant.
Is that what you were saying?
The Author sets the parameters of the character or scene, then we fill in the rest. Not just with how things look and feel, but how many times have you been discussing a book with a group and there are almost as many pronunciations of a name as there are people in the group?
In other words, drawing pictures of the characters (and probably not very good ones, since I'm no good at human beings) might actually detract from the novel, in as much as I would be forcibly imposing my own interpretation of the cast on others - each of whom has already re-imagined that same world in a slightly different and personal way, more relevant to their own way of thinking and personal preferences.
I wonder why its so different with maps...
EDIT: Have you ever considered that there are as many parallel worlds in reality as there are people - each of those parallel realities being an individual sentient perception of the actual reality? That said, we are all living in our own little stories
By imposing my own impression of what a character I have already written about looks like on someone else, I am in effect trying to tell them how to think about an entity they have already identified as a sentient being (which, if I was trying to tell that person what his or her parents, spouse or children actually looked like, would be at the very least rude and/or weirdly invasive), whereas, by giving someone a map I am merely giving them something interesting to look at.
I'm still no closer to deciding however, because I still need to solidify in my own mind what my characters really look like so I don't go and change them half way through the story by accident, and this is where I believe CA3 might prove to be most useful - just for me, while I'm still at the writing stage.
I don't think it it so much as imposing though - ultimately, it is your work, and you're the Author. You are the final authority of what is in these worlds you have created. People just get cranky when you mess with their perceptions, right? So it's all about how you introduce that defining moment and what tools you use. I actually do, quite often. Have you ever read Number of the Beast by Robert A Heinlein?