Looking for symbol making tips

LisaHartjes

Howdy!

I'm starting work on a very large project and I want to create my own hand drawn style symbols. The symbols will need to cover the full range, from overland to dungeons. Does anyone have any tips on how I can ensure the symbols start off at the right scale? For example, all normal sized chairs have symbols that are the same size at the scale of 1.0.

I hope I explained what I'm looking for.




Lisa

Monsen

The most important is to keep them internally consistent obviously, as everything can be resized and/or rescaled.

For overland symbols, the default ProFantasy symbols are created at a resolution of 20 pixels per drawing unit (For "Very High" resolution symbols). Which means that if you wish something to be 5 drawing units wide at symbol scale 1.0, the image file should be 100 pixels wide.
Dungeon symbols uses a resolution of 100 pixels/drawing unit, and City symbols uses 40/pixels drawing unit.

Keep in mind that these are the default values used for ProFantasy symbols, you can always import symbols at whatever value you wish

LisaHartjes

Thanks for your help! That's exactly what I was looking for.



Lisa

LisaHartjes

Now I've got another question.

What exactly is a drawing unit? For example, is a drawing unit on an overland map 1 mile?

jaerdaph

Hi Lisa,
In overland maps, the default drawing unit is whatever you want it to be - 1 mile, 1 km or 1 Klingon Kellicam. The unit system isn't specified.

Monsen

True, but standard maps uses a default value of 1 map unit = 1 mile on overland maps, while 1 map unit equals 1 foot on dungeon and city maps. For metric maps, 1 drawing unit would equal 1 km and 1 meter respectively. But as jaerdaph says, 1 drawing unit can be defined to mean exactly what you want it to be.

LisaHartjes

Thanks. I was looking for the 1 drawing unit = 1 (whatever base distance unit) confirmation.

Thanks!

jaerdaph

If you do want something like feet ' and inches " to show up with distances, coordinates etc., go to File -> Drawing Properties to bring up the Drawing Presets dialog box, click the Drawing Units button under Settings, and you can pull down different options under Distance Display Format. That box has other things you can play around with too, like defining drawing units.

Simon Rogers

CC3’s overland mapping templates are arranged so that one inch equals a mile - while it would be possible to arrange to have true-sized maps, this degree of precision is unwieldy. DD3 and other add-ons use Feet by default, but we do have metric templates.

If you were to print an overland map, you might type 1 in the paper size and 100 in the drawing distance for a map where one inch equals 100 miles.

For any other maps we use real world units. A foot or meter in a map is just that, so when you print a map created in feet and inches (a dungeon map, say) you would put
Paper distance 1" and drawing distance 5' if you wanted to print out at 1 inch equals five feet.