Recreating Darlene's Map

Old Guy

A couple of days ago, I finally got the push I needed to start work on a hex-based map in CC3. I had my doubts but I quickly discovered that CC3 does a wonderful job of dealing with hexes!

Seeing that things were going so well, I decided to take a shot at re-creating Darlene's World of Greyhawk map.

Now I need to find some suitable fonts and lots of symbols (cities, mountains, hills, trees, etc). The default cc3 symbols will work, but I want to get as close as I can to the symbols Darlene actually used. Also, I'd like to add the appropriate shield to each region. I know I saw a catalog of WoG shields years ago. Now I just need to hunt them down.

Here are a couple of images of what I have so far:

SkidAce

I am extremely impressed and would like to subscribe to your newsletter....please keep updating your thread and eventually share?

Let me look around I may have a symbol catalog with the WoG city symbols in it. If I can't find it or you don't want to wait, I beleive I may have downloaded it from the Profantasy "examples?" page.

Old Guy

Thanks for reminding me about the examples page (I always forget it's there).

I made some WoG city symbols this morning and found the shields on the examples page.

I should be able to make everything else I need except the trees, and the default cc3 trees are close enough.

Now I just need fonts. Anyone have any recommendations before I dive into the various font sites?

Kendall-DM

Nicely done, brings back memories.

jaerdaph

Looking good - that's going to be a beautiful map when it is finished! As you undoubtedly already know, Darlene did all the lettering by hand. She did, however, design a font for TSR called Greyhawk Uncial but I don't think it was ever released publicly and I don't know of any "clones" out there.
I would suggest looking through the Celtic collection at dafont.com, and maybe mix and match a couple of similar ones:
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=403
There are some beautiful fonts in there and browsing through them right now is starting to give me some ideas for projects...

Old Guy

Anna at ghmaps pointed me towards the Carolingia font. It isn't quite the same but it is a beautiful font and I just finished adding all the regional names with it. So far I think it looks pretty good. I didn't realize there were so many regions/forests/hills/etc. And there are tons more cities and rivers (and each river needs to follow a curve). Good thing I didn't know what I was getting myself in for or I never would have started this.

That's the first I've heard that Darlene created a font based on her WoG map lettering. I'll do some digging. If TSR never did anything with it, rights may have reverted to her by now.

Old Guy

Starting with scans was a very bad idea.

I had large scans and fiddled with them endlessly in PS to get em as straight as possible. But when the original maps are severely distorted, there's only so much you can do (It's a shame TSR couldn't have sold the maps rolled in plastic tubes instead of folded).

I thought I was keeping the images in check while I transferred them into cc3 (constantly adjusting them to line up with the hex grid layer) but apparently I didn't do as good a job as I thought. A large section of the map was off by one hex. I would have considered letting it go but the area affected was between Nyr Dyv and Bright Desert and most of the Lortmil mountains. That's just too important an area to screw up.

So I've spent the last few hours fixing the problem areas, and verifying that the rest is accurate. Between that and the time I spent initially preparing the scans, I think I've spent far more time there than in doing the mapping itself.

I still have a few more layers to adjust (just the lake contours in the Nyr Dyv) and then all should be well again. All the text is in place (except for rivers and a few others that require special placement). I just need place the symbols (trees, paths, hills, mountains, cities, etc).

But that's all going to have to wait now. I need to set this aside for a couple of days.

Barliman

I've no suggestion to offer, just fulsome praise: that is a beautiful start. I'll be interested to see how this develops.

Ralf

Very good! And glad to hear you're liking CC3's hexmap functionality.

Old Guy

I finally got some time to work on the map again. Making some progress but still a long way to go. I now have all the rivers and cities in their correct locations. That was a chore. Cities all use a filled circle for now. I can't distinguish symbols from the scans so I'll go back on a separate layer later and add the correct ones from the info in the folio. Not looking forward to labeling rivers (each needs to follow a curve and there are a LOT of rivers).

I've recently gained even greater respect for Darlene. After placing all the text, I've spent a great deal of time resizing and repositioning everything to increase readability and balance. Without the aid of a computer, she did all that layout in her head and achieved amazing results.

jaerdaph

Very nice! The font choice works very well with this.

Old Guy

I placed all the forests yesterday. In order to get the text to stand out better, I placed a glow effect on all text placed over forests (green matching the background behind the forest symbols, strength 2, blur radius 10, outside). Generally, this worked well.

However, there is a problem with this glow when the text isn't over the forest (as you can see in "Axewood" in the center of the image). I will be repositioning all such text anyway, but I don't understand why this is happening. It disappears on very tight zoom levels but otherwise is persistent. There are no other effects on the text.

sdavies2720

When you specify the glow, you also specify a color. In this case, you chose green (which looks great over the forests). So everywhere that text appears, it appears with a green glow around it. It blends in on the forest, but it stands out on the plains.

Steve

Kendall-DM

Great map, brings back memories of the Greyhawk world I had years ago. I would make the forest symbols a bit smaller than you have them though, I feel they are occluding parts of the map unintentionally.

Old Guy

Posted By: sdavies2720When you specify the glow, you also specify a color. In this case, you chose green (which looks great over the forests). So everywhere that text appears, it appears with a green glow around it. It blends in on the forest, but it stands out on the plains.
Steve

Actually, I'm referring to the bleed-through problem. When the text is not over the forest, the glow is rather disturbing but that's expected. But there is also a bleed-through of the underlying light green. That should not be there.

@Kendall - I suspect that the areas you are referring to are where the forests overlap some of the hills. On Darlene's map, there are some hexes that are both hilly and forested. What she did was to make the overlap area green with hill symbols. I tried that and it looked very odd, so instead I filled those hexes with hill color and then covered them with tree symbols. I may go back and redo that though as I agree it looks a bit odd. I think the scale is pretty close to what she used though.

Kendall-DM

Yes, the hills, but also the rivers. Many of the parts of the map have just the outline of the forest with the hills added, looked better than way IMHO. The rivers should be above the forest symbols, at least that is how she did it. It's a trick to get it to look right, I know that. Still, even so, this is a very good version thus far, and I would use it if I was running the Greyhawk world as my game. Excellent job!

Old Guy

Posted By: Kendall-DMYes, the hills, but also the rivers. Many of the parts of the map have just the outline of the forest with the hills added, looked better than way IMHO. The rivers should be above the forest symbols, at least that is how she did it. It's a trick to get it to look right, I know that. Still, even so, this is a very good version thus far, and I would use it if I was running the Greyhawk world as my game. Excellent job!

It actually took a great deal of effort to get the trees to gently infringe upon the rivers like that. But if you want the rivers to float above the trees, that can easily be changed with sheet order. Here's an example of both versions.

I like the effect of the rivers being partially obscured by the trees (although it would look better without the damn shadows on the tree symbols - throws an eraser at whomever thought symbol shadows were a good idea). But seeing them side by side, I think I kind of like the floating rivers better. Fortunately, it's easy to flip between them.

sdavies2720

Posted By: Old Guy

Posted By: sdavies2720When you specify the glow, you also specify a color. In this case, you chose green (which looks great over the forests). So everywhere that text appears, it appears with a green glow around it. It blends in on the forest, but it stands out on the plains.
Steve

Actually, I'm referring to the bleed-through problem. When the text is not over the forest, the glow is rather disturbing but that's expected. But there is also a bleed-through of the underlying light green. That should not be there.
...
It's hard for me to see what you're talking about -- it looks like there is a slight lighter (I assumed white) outline around the letters -- is that it?

What effects are set for that sheet? A zoom-in on Axewood might help as well

Steve

Old Guy

The effects for the sheet are listed a few messages back. Zooming in on the text causes the bleed to disappear. Since I'll be repositioning text so that it is entirely over forested areas, this isn't really an issue for this map. But I'd like to know what's causing it so I'm prepared next time it appears. I suspect it's a problem with the glow effect but I haven't run into it before.

jonasgreenfeather

I've had some odd visual effects popup before as well. My solutions have always involved reordering the effects on a specific sheet: Here is a hypothetical example (as I don't remember the specific effects and their order):

On the Symbol Sheet I had a Glow followed by a Drop Shadow

When I rendered the effects I had a similar out line surrounding all my symbols (trees, mountains, cities), the sheet above it had a glow effect as well and the two stacked on each other seemed to cause the issue. I reordered the effects so that Drop Shadow was first and Glow was second and that cleared the issue (see example below).

Poor render
Sheet (whatever) Effect: Glow
Sheet (under whatever) Effect: Glow
Effect: Drop Shadow
After reorder:
Sheet (whatever) Effect: Glow
Sheet (under whatever) Effect: DropShadow
Effect: Glow
Issue fixed! (please keep in mind this is how my (fuzzy) memory has built the solution

All that to ask the question(s):
Does the brown/tan Sheet (land?) of your map that "Axew" is sitting over, have any (or no) effects applied to it that may "confuse" the renderer in CC3? I see that the forests have a Glow applied to them, have you tried adding or removing it from the land sheet?

Keep Calm
and
Map On

Old Guy

Posted By: jonasgreenfeather
Does the brown/tan Sheet (land?) of your map that "Axew" is sitting over, have any (or no) effects applied to it that may "confuse" the renderer in CC3? I see that the forests have a Glow applied to them, have you tried adding or removing it from the land sheet?

That should be a light green. There is a drop shadow used to get the coastlines to look the way they do. I turned them off (in fact I turned off all other effects) with no change.

After a bit of experimentation (to no effect), I created a new drawing with just a basic landmass, a few tree symbols and some text over it. I added a glow to the text and am able to duplicate the same problem. I'm concluding this is a bug. Not sure how best to deal with it till it gets fixed but fortunately it won't affect this map once I reposition text.

@Ralf: Here's the sample map I used for testing. If you zoom in with a graphics program, the bleed issue is very apparent.

Ralf

Yes, that's a problem with the Anti-aliasing of true type fonts in conjunction with the Glow effect. There's no fix as such, but you can use this workaround:

- create a copy of all your text (that has the glow) on a sheet just above (in the sheet list) the TEXT sheet, eg. TEXT OUTLINE.
- change the Text Properties of that text to "Outline Only".
- change its Pen Thickness ("Pen", not "Line") to 0.05

In fact, if you change the color of that outline text to the forest green, this may be the better option to make the text visible against the forests than using the glow.

Hey, that's how we did outlined text back in the olden days (of CC2).

Old Guy

Excellent workaround. Thanks Ralf!

JimP

Ah yes, the slightly larger white text behind the letters to make the letters stand out. I remember that.

OldGuy

* Sigh *

My hard drive crashed and my external backup hard drive was damaged.

I was hoping that I had uploaded the .fcw file here, but no such luck.

Looks like it's gone forever. : (

Henrie61

Damn that is bad.
Sorry to hear that.
Was a great project.

Latharion

If you don't do anything with the damaged hard drive, there is a chance that the data can be restored. There are services that exist that can extract data from damaged hard drives. They usually charge based on amount of data that needs to be retrieved, etc. All is not lost, unless you disposed of the drive itself. The only question is whether the data is worth retrieving or not. In this case, I'd say it is worth it, but that's a matter of opinion and yours is the only one that matters.
Here are some sites that offer data retrieval services...

http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/
http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/
http://www.datarecovery.com/

There are others as well. Good luck. I hope you are able to retrive the FCW file, as the project was fantastic!

OldGuy

Thanks Latharion. I hadn't considered such services because I'm sure their fees are more than I want to spend but I suppose I should at least find out for sure. Every day I'm remembering more files that were lost.

JimP

You might also go to Western Digital's web site and download their free program Acronis true image. It has a 'recover a hard drive from backup' ability. Maybe it can be used to read your hard drive ?

jigsawman

I think that is the best darned map I have seen you make. I am not into this particular style, but you got me really liking it now. Awesome!
JSM

auryx

I realise I'm coming to this thread very, very late, but out of interest, wasn't there a version of the Greyhawk map done for CC2 at some point? I seem to remember it being in the ProFantasy Map Library?