Jan Challenge WIP Island Map - Finished :)

01i

[EDIT]

Finished

Entry in competition thread

[/EDIT]

Hi.

I am currently working on an Island map for the January 2014 challenge thread (assuming I can get it finished for March 1st).

I was wondering if someone could provide me with advice as to how I connect the river with my coastline? It looks fine when I'm working with sheet effects off, but as soon as I turn them on to see how the finished map will render, the river and coast REALLY don't work together.

What should I do to connect the two and make them look good when sheet effects are turned on?

Mirithol

Hi 01i,

Did you try using the modifiers - snaps the cursor to significant points on an entity (like a coastline). They are the lowest six buttons on the right side of the screen (at least, on my setup). The one you want is the diagonal blue line with a red circle about a quarter of the way up.

Joe Sweeney does a YouTube on adding rivers. It's on the ProFantasy site under Community/Tutorials/Overland Mapping & General.../part 6 or F - Adding Rivers for a quick review or here:



Good luck in the contest.

By the way - would you share where you found all of those excellent ships? I'm doing a port city. Also looking for ship wrecks.

Thanks,
Miri

01i

I've watched the tutorial that you linked me to, before. Snap to makes a little difference, but not a whole lot unless I delete a load of nodes from my coats in order to create a perfect line to snap to, even then, sometimes the one side of the river snaps nicely, and the other side is a tiny bit off.

If the land glow is changed to inside, the glow around the river banks show into the water, and if the land glow is set to outside (like now) the sand shows after the end of the river.

The maps I made when I was following Gandwarf's tutorial didn't have this problem, so I think that the problem is due to the fact that my Sea and river are on different layers. I made this map with the sea as the background, and with CD3 city maps (including the ones made using gandwarf's tutorial) that's not usually the case.

Only way I could change things at this point to make sea and rivers on the same layer, would be to find a way to create a fill that (in art program terms) would be an inverted version of the current land layer. I havn't got a clue if that's possible, and if it is how I might do it.

Maybe it'll be easier to just photoshop the ends of the rivers after the map is done.

To answer your question, ships are from the CSUAC, I made all the trees on my map myself, and everything else so far is either from default installs of CD3 or DD3

Ralf

Too smoothly blend the river into the sea, you will need to turn off the sheet effects on the River's sheet and make the river a little longer, so it goes past the beach effect.

Of course that will rob you of the darker edge of the river - I would recommend drawing a little darker outline on the city background underneath the river. If you create a new sheet for that, you can also apply a Blur or Edge Fade Inner effect to integrate it more nicely into the background.

01i

Ralf, thanks a lot for that tip, it has made the end of the river look a lot better

I was a little worried about the darker outline ending up with the same problems once it gets to the coats boundary, so thought I'd experiment with some small dikes instead. I've added it to the first section of rive up to the bridge as a tester.

I also repositioned my river end slightly (and amended the road network to compensate), added a drop shadow to the docks (and then altered the sun position so the shadows still worked) and added a bit of a widening polygon to the end of the river to get rid of very straight cut offs into the beach.

Do you guys think that this looks better?

01i

The frame of this map measures 3 miles by 3 miles, but it's a CD3 map so it's in as 15840x15840 feet. The screenshots that I've attached to this thread so far, are basically just quick screen grabs of a small area that I pasted into photoshop, cut out the section I wanted, and saved as a PNG. I've been attempting to save my map as a PNG using CC3 and I'm not really sure if the program can actually copy with the map.

My first attempt was to save the map as a PNG with no anti-aliasing and at 1 foot to 1 pixel. That's pretty close to the resolution of the images in this thread which seem to be about 3 pixels for every 4 feet. I put 15840 x 15840 in the max box and the process crashed pretty quickly. I decided to try saving this time at 1/3 of the resolution 5280x5280px and tried with 25% anti-aliasing. This has now been running for about 30-40 mins, CC3 says it's 'Not Responding' but it's fluctuating between 650-800MB of RAM and is using a constant 50% of my CPU that doesn't really fluctuate much. It certainly seems to be doing 'something', but the status of the app as far as windows is concerned is `Not Responding` and it still stays "Rendering Pass 1/15 please wait" after 30-40 mins.

I don't really know if I should just leave it going for as many minutes or hours as it needs, or whether I need to save in a specific way to get a large file. Is there a good tutorial somewhere that details the best way to make very high resolution exports?

01i

Turns out that a few mins after I wrote this post, that image finished exporting. I ended up with an image at 1 pixel for 3 feet and it doesn't look as sharp as I'd have liked. My trees look really nice, but the roofs look pretty crappy.It would be nice to know if there is a way I can save the image without it adding those black blobs to the roofs. I'm going to try again this time making the image a bit larger, but without using the anti-aliasing at all.

gandalfmagic

To obtain a better image at small sizes, maybe you should export a big size version of the map and then resize it with Photoshop (or Gimp).
Here is your map using the second version of the image as base for the resize.

01i

Gandalf,

You misunderstand. I'm not just saving a small area, I'm printing off a HUGE map and am just posting a small chunk of it in this thread. I'm just using the same chunk as before for context. I would post the whole map, but it's huge and doesn't show the issues I'm seeing unless you zoom in to a small area like I'm doing.

The actual image that the last little 450x287px snippet came from is 5280x5280px in size (3 feet on the city map is 1 pixel on the image). I can't save the map at 1px to 1 foot, simply because CC3 crashes when I try, so I'm gradually working my way up.

I've now got a 7040x7040px map saved, and the same snippet from that one (left of attached image) is 598x433px. The problem is still there though. My tree symbols look great (pretty much identical to how they look in app), as does the land, coast, rivers, dikes and ships. But the roofs and the docks look awful.

The export is nothing like the versions you see on screen in CC3 when you render the effects. You can see the difference with this example. The left is an exported JPG at 100% quality the right is print screen from the app.

gandalfmagic

Ok, sorry if I misunderstood. But maybe I still don't get it.
Is the "exported" side of the image at zoom factor 1:1 in your image viewer? If not, can you post a detail of a single house at 1:1 zoom from your exported jpeg file? I believe it should looks fine.

Just to explain myself I've made a quick map, and exported a jpeg in a similar way you do. I'm not sure I used the same symbols you use in you map, and scale factors are surely different.

Below you see my samples aligned like the one in your previous post (only road and houses on my map).
If you refer to the noise on the roofs (these black blobs are less evident on my map), this is a simple artifact due the extreme rescale of the image needed for it to fit the screen.
If you zoom the image (the exported jpeg), you'll see the roof the same way as you see in the DETAIL box of my image. It seems you are using symbols with roof-tiles on top of them, so is natural to see such noise.

I think the same problem is for the texture image of the docks.

01i

Gandalf, I my non-screenshot images are already posted at the 1:1 ratio. I appreciate that there is some sort of rescaling issue, CC3 manages to rescale them fine to display, so why can't it rescale them when exporting?

I can't upload the full map here as it is far too large, so I'll link you to it instead. I didn't include the full map before simply because the majority of it is unfinished and therefore not really ready to show.

But if it will make things clearer here is a link to the biggest JPG I have been currently able to save : Griffendon_try2.JPG

Shessar

CC3 uses several resolutions for the fills depending on the zoom level on your screen, using lower quality bitmaps when zoomed out to save memory. It exports using whatever the current resolutions is.

To get around this when exporting, go to View>Display Speed Settings and set the Fixed Bitmap Quality to Very High. You will have to re-set this every time you restart CC3.

01i

Shessar, are you saying that when I zoom out in order to have the full map in view to be printed, CC3 is switching the textures used for the export to be the VL textures rather than the VH textures I see when zoomed in a bit more? I just can't 'see' this effect in app because I've needed to zoom out in order to get the whole map on screen?

gandalfmagic

Nice work, it's promising!

Yes, IMO the problem can be from the large scale of the map, and the relatively small size of the symbols, but I can't say for sure, since I've never used such a combination.
Did you try adding a little blur effect on the houses sheet?

To achieve a larger export resolutions maybe you can try with the PdfCreator method, as explained here.

01i

I already tried the PDF method but am not really sure what went wrong with it. My settings in PDFCreator were as described but the image created was just a large high resolution image of green. Tried it a couple of times and ended up with the same thing. What confused me was that my map started on a sea background, so it wasn't just printing the background and missing everything else out. Nor was it following the orientation setting I selected in PDF creator (i.e I selected landscape and got a large portrait image). I downloaded a new copy of PDFCreator just in case (my copy was several years old I think).

Fingers crossed Shessar's suggestion works, if I understood right then it sort of makes sense from a technical perspective. I'm very glad I tried saving now though, this would have been very annoying had I left it to the last minute, and missed the competition deadline.

Shessar

Posted By: 01iShessar, are you saying that when I zoom out in order to have the full map in view to be printed, CC3 is switching the textures used for the export to be the VL textures rather than the VH textures I see when zoomed in a bit more? I just can't 'see' this effect in app because I've needed to zoom out in order to get the whole map on screen?

Yes, that is exactly what is happening!

Your other problem may be that you are exporting in the .jpg format. JPEGs are a lossy format. That is, they exclude some of the images definition in order to make the file size smaller and exclude even more when resizing in paint type software. PNGs are lossless and give the best resolution when exporting and also when resizing.

01i

As it turns out, if I save the map forcing it to use the VH textures (as JPG or PNG) I still get these corrupted textures. However if I save the map forcing it to use the LOW versions (not the VL) then the buildings look fine. I think the problem is that the high res textures are being shrunk down to be used in small spaces that they are not suited for and this skrinking process is obviously showing up in the textures. The attachment is what I get when I force LOW textures, and I reverted back to a 5280x5280px map because I was crashing doing a PNG at 7040x7040px.

However, if I force the use of low res to sort out the fill textures, the symbols (e.g. my trees) don't look as nice as they did in previous saves. They still look pretty good, and I could live with this level of detail, but they looked slightly better in previous saves.

Is there a way to just force low res textures for the fills, and keep the default textures (which is was picking higher resolution) for the symbols? I can see that in display speed settings I can modify something related to fill style resolutions, but I'm not really sure whether I could use this to achieve the goal of forcing CC3 to use LOW fills and VH symbols, or not.

01i

Ok, so my map is now about 75% completed. It's currently far too large to meet the 2MB requirement for the competition, so I am thinking about shrinking down the main map to be about 25% of the size in the version I'm linking to, with a ring of closer view section added around the outer edge to show better detail for certain areas.

I'm pretty happy with how my first map is turning out, and have learned a hell of a lot. Putting down individual trees takes AGES but I think it's ends up looking pretty good and I'm glad I spent the time first making a large symbol set of custom trees.

I've got to get in finished up tomorrow, so thought I'd post a link to a high res copy now, and ask if anyone has any recommendations for layer effects that would make it better.

Currently there is the main walled port, a logging village in the north, a load of farmland mixed between crops and livestock to the west of the main settlement, a small 'rich' area with private docks just north of the city and a small lookout on one of the islands. I'm considering more trees and farmland in the unfinished areas.

http://www.theten.co.uk/Griffendon_75percent.PNG

Excuse the roof fill quality, I was testing out medium to see if it would work better than low. I'll stick with low for the final image

01i

Finally finished it in the nick of time and posted in the competition thread
http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=4206&page=1#Comment_29414

KenG

O1i this is a really great looking project. Good luck

01i

Thanks I'm really pleased with how it turned out. IMO it just goes to show that regardless of experience, if you put the effort into using CC3/CD3, even a total beginner can produce a detailed map that looks nice using pretty much the default sheet effects and a little bit of experimentation. I read that CC3 has a steep learning curve, but other than getting my head around a couple of little things (copy for example), I found that it's actually quite easy to use.

blather

I totally agree, the contest did wonders to spur me into action and forced a lot of learning. Your map looks fantastic BTW.