I'm not sure I know what parts of anything are emerald any more. Most of the UK is pretty grey and muddy at the moment. We've just had a succession of five 'named storms' over the last couple of months, so several shades of mud would be more appropriate :P
I think when I get as far as doing all the smaller things I'd like to do all four seasons of deciduous trees. I particularly like the idea of being able to use blossom trees in a map once in a while.
I should perhaps remind everyone that this is a top down style. I know that's unusual for an overland style, but it all started with a desire to achieve the holy grail of shaded mountain symbols, so its a top down style
You may have to bear with me. There's a lot of work to be done, and I'm having definite problems with Genetica being extra slow all of a sudden. I hope that's not down to the Intel bug fix!
Having to wait 30 minutes for each texture update to happen is starting to grate just a bit, but I'll keep plodding on for a while yet...
Thank you - you're very kind, but its really not so difficult, Quenten. About the only tricky thing so far has been the mountains themselves, and the technique is well described by Joe Slayton in his latest Fun with Wilbur tutorial.
If you want to have a go at it yourself its really quite easy to learn. The current 64 bit download of Wilbur, and the first 6 tutorials are here on this page:
Joe kindly uploaded the pdf version of his seventh tutorial - the one that I followed to create those mountains shown above, here in my Shaded Mountain thread as a pdf.
I'm with Quenten! And top-down will be a nice change. When you get to the seasonal trees may I suggest actually 5 options? flowering, leafed out, autumnal, bare, and bare with snow? Just a suggestion... What's a little more work? lol!
Ok, but don't get your hopes up too much. Its the worst thing when everyone has to wait so long - sometimes the expectations get a bit high, and then the result is a bit of a disappointment.
LOL - Just bear in mind the trouble I had when I was trying to hand draw tree symbols for Merelan City :P
But do you mean the rubber octopi I drew, or the Vue trees I ended up with? :P
A note on that last point while I remember it. I never gave you all the Vue trees because of EULA rules governing the distribution of those things. I don't even use them any more myself. I use Blender trees instead. They have no such restriction. A small set of them are included in the extra symbols and fills I gave to the atlas.
For this new style I don't know if I will use Blender trees, a derivative of them, or go completely hand drawn. The city and town icons will definitely be hand drawn. I'll have to see if my drawing skills have improved sufficiently to do a decent job of them
I was offered a handsome sum for just a full sized print of it to go in a frame on a wall somewhere, but I couldn't sell it - because of those TREES!
That was one of those 'Oh crap, I could really have done with the dosh' moments.
Never mind. If I make anything new that someone wants to buy I've made sure I can sell it this time by making my trees in Blender.
I might get around to replacing all those Vue trees on MC one day, and see if anyone is still interested, but right now I have lots of other things to distract me.
Not least of which is the question of grass....
These are what I've come up with tonight (all jpg for size reasons - if you want to try them you will have to convert them to png first):
Wow, if I were you I would be replacing those trees as soon as possible on Merelan City and re-contacting whoever it was that wanted to buy it from you and sell them a copy! But maybe that's because I'm unemployed :P
Personally, I've been wanting to get the entire FCW to Merelan City since you made it so I can see EXACTLY how you made those beautiful oceans/seas/sands/rocks near the beach, etc. I still haven't been able to get it to work right, even though you've helped me a little on it. I just found the beaches and the water and the sands on that map so fantastic that I've been wanting to make maps that have the same kind of look myself.
Wow, if I were you I would be replacing those trees as soon as possible on Merelan City and re-contacting whoever it was that wanted to buy it from you and sell them a copy! But maybe that's because I'm unemployed :P
Personally, I've been wanting to get the entire FCW to Merelan City since you made it so I can see EXACTLY how you made those beautiful oceans/seas/sands/rocks near the beach, etc. I still haven't been able to get it to work right, even though you've helped me a little on it. I just found the beaches and the water and the sands on that map so fantastic that I've been wanting to make maps that have the same kind of look myself.
Thank you!
To be honest, Tony, I really think the lady will have taken an illegal copy of it by now, even though the highest available resolution online is only 2500 pi square (I think). The one I can't actually afford to print for myself is 5000 pi square.
I thought I uploaded an actual segment of Merelan City FCW somewhere about the site? If not then maybe I should do a tutorial at some point. I really must finish this style first, though. I have too many half finished projects lying around as it is. I don't want to add an entire style to that pile or I'll never go back to any of it.
I did more or less the same job on Scribble rock, just slightly different colour variation of it. I'm certain I uploaded a sample of that one?
The problem with most of my FCWs is that I use a lot of my own textures - even as early on as Merelan city, the seaweed and rock were my own textures. In fact, because you don't have Bogie's Mapping Objects you won't have the sand either. And I think the grit was BMO as well. Which means that you would only have been able to see the water layers. The exact shade and tone of the sand is more important than you think in that effect. It has to be very pale and exactly the right shade of warm yellow-grey for the water to look right
Posted By: QuentenWow. The arid almost is like Aussie pasture!
Thanks, Quenten Is almost good enough?
The way I envisage using any of these textures is mixed together with each other and various edge fade effects in operation (which is why they are going to have to be tested quite rigorously for transparency acne before I call them all finished). For example, I would probably have dozens of ragged patches of the dead grass breaking up the edge of the desert sand as a sort of do-it-yourself scrubland. Dot a few dead bushes around and its done. I think doing stuff like that by hand is more natural looking than creating a scrubland texture with ready made bushes, because you can dot the bushes along the wadis, and dot little rock symbols on the plateaus. (Not that I'm criticising my favourite HW style )
Actually, I downloaded Bogies Mapping Objects right after you told me you still use them I've checked all of the Merelan City threads hoping you had downloaded the file somewhere, though I still have to check the thread on the Cartographer's Guild.
I don't think I have ever uploaded an FCW to the Guild. I don't think its possible anyway.
BMO is covered by a similar EULA. Its just a separate document from the CSUAC one, and therefore wasn't involved in that little mess where I ended up deleting the CSUAC
You still don't have the seaweed or the rocks. Those are ones I made. I uploaded them here, but you aren't likely to have stored them in the same folder in the same place as I've got them, even if you downloaded them.
Don't worry - I'll have a root around in the archives today and *sea* what I can find :P
I hardly ever use the tiles in BMO, but before I started making my own grass textures I used two of the three grass fills almost exclusively practically everywhere, only cussing the fact that they only come in HI resolution, and not VH, like the PF fills.
The most frequently used symbols I use from that set are the canoes and rowing boats. The flat stone bridge is an absolute favourite. You can never have enough of that little stone bridge and its ruined brother
I've been working on these textures as a set all day to try and bring them into line with each other as far as colour is concerned.
I would love to know what you think. Are any of them a bit bright/dull? Do you think one or two of them just don't go with the set? Are any of them so garishly horrible that you really dare not say what you really think? :P
i LOVE these, Sue! Only suggestion i would make is to add an additional desert with a little less "yellow" in it? Closer to the mountain background? But that's just my own personal tastes. I'd love to use them, but currently everything i am working on is a commission both of which I am providing the .fcw so including these fills wouldn't be feasible.....but once i get back to my own campaign...i'm anxious to incorporate them when complete! Are you going to sell them as a set with the symbols? Maybe another PF Annual???
That's great, since I know how sensitive you are to colour and its use
Hmmm.... grey sand?
Ok, but I'll make it a separate texture to the existing one. I could also do a more reddish/pinkish version. Sand comes in all shades in a desert, depending on what minerals are being leached or cooked to oxide. Iron (rust) is what makes some parts of the Sahara red...
And this is where I blush quite hotly, since I admit to asking Ralf for the list of fills and symbols that are required to make up an annual edition. It all remains to be seen if they fit the bill when I'm done - Ralf's decision, as you know.
If they aren't quite right for an annual, I could always take Remy up on his offer of hosting it all, so that people can download them and add to their collection?
I can't wait to see what you've done for your Annual
EDIT: I've got a very long way to go yet. I might have a go at the swamp, tundra, marsh, volcanic fills next, but after that I've still got to do all the symbols... and then the fills that involve using the symbols or matching the fills harmoniously to the individual symbol style - the individual trees and the forest fills and so on. I'm still intending to do four seasons for the temperate region maps
I typed, tried to get a cloer look and the textures by right clicking and my text is gone. Lets see if I can remember it.
Some look a bit 'flat' to me. I can see texture, bumps; in desert, grass dead, mountain background, and the middle one on the bottom row. There are no names there.
I'm kinda certain I said something else, but its gone fomr my mind.
I think an autosave for typed text, so if someone, particularly me, who needs to recover text, can do so. May not be available though. What I have seen on other forums is it only keeps the text for less than 5 minutes.
I think I see what you mean, though these are 2000 pi square in 'real life'. Possibly the land textures could do with a bit more... umph?
I think I really need to make a sort of 'master map' of the set as I go, so that I can see what's lacking on an actual map, instead of trying to get things to work in blocks of little squares :P
Ok. I'll add a few more and then work on a map with them all together
Generally, they all look great to me, although I'll have to echo Jim's mention of "flatness" on some of them. Just a bit more texture, I think. The colors, themselves, are very nice. Also glad to hear of possible additional hues for some like the desert. Sands DO come in various colors from black to red to "sandy" (not that I'd expect a dozen, but two or three options would be very nice, as you've done with the water and grass). Truly impressive.
I think I will try to keep the sheer number of textures down to a reasonable maximum, since its always possible to adjust the hue quite a lot with an HSL sheet effect, but yes, I will do at least one more sand variation.
The flatness you see in the tiny squares above may in some relatively large part be down to the extreme reduction in size. They do look a lot flatter in that image than they really are at full size
I would make the arid grass a little more arid, personally. But I guess we are used to various shades of brown and olive in Australia, so may not apply to Europe of course.
Comments
I think when I get as far as doing all the smaller things I'd like to do all four seasons of deciduous trees. I particularly like the idea of being able to use blossom trees in a map once in a while.
I should perhaps remind everyone that this is a top down style. I know that's unusual for an overland style, but it all started with a desire to achieve the holy grail of shaded mountain symbols, so its a top down style
Having to wait 30 minutes for each texture update to happen is starting to grate just a bit, but I'll keep plodding on for a while yet...
If you want to have a go at it yourself its really quite easy to learn. The current 64 bit download of Wilbur, and the first 6 tutorials are here on this page:
http://www.fracterra.com/wilbur.html
Joe kindly uploaded the pdf version of his seventh tutorial - the one that I followed to create those mountains shown above, here in my Shaded Mountain thread as a pdf.
http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=7869&page=1#Item_19
LOL - Just bear in mind the trouble I had when I was trying to hand draw tree symbols for Merelan City :P
But do you mean the rubber octopi I drew, or the Vue trees I ended up with? :P
A note on that last point while I remember it. I never gave you all the Vue trees because of EULA rules governing the distribution of those things. I don't even use them any more myself. I use Blender trees instead. They have no such restriction. A small set of them are included in the extra symbols and fills I gave to the atlas.
For this new style I don't know if I will use Blender trees, a derivative of them, or go completely hand drawn. The city and town icons will definitely be hand drawn. I'll have to see if my drawing skills have improved sufficiently to do a decent job of them
I think it was the Vue. trees.
I actually had to turn down a nice fat sale of Merelan City because of those ******** trees!
That was one of those 'Oh crap, I could really have done with the dosh' moments.
Never mind. If I make anything new that someone wants to buy I've made sure I can sell it this time by making my trees in Blender.
I might get around to replacing all those Vue trees on MC one day, and see if anyone is still interested, but right now I have lots of other things to distract me.
Not least of which is the question of grass....
These are what I've come up with tonight (all jpg for size reasons - if you want to try them you will have to convert them to png first):
Grass dead_SD
[Image_10141]
Grass arid_SD
[Image_10142]
Grass normal_SD
[Image_10143]
Grass emerald_SD
[Image_10144]
Wow, if I were you I would be replacing those trees as soon as possible on Merelan City and re-contacting whoever it was that wanted to buy it from you and sell them a copy! But maybe that's because I'm unemployed :P
Personally, I've been wanting to get the entire FCW to Merelan City since you made it so I can see EXACTLY how you made those beautiful oceans/seas/sands/rocks near the beach, etc. I still haven't been able to get it to work right, even though you've helped me a little on it. I just found the beaches and the water and the sands on that map so fantastic that I've been wanting to make maps that have the same kind of look myself.
To be honest, Tony, I really think the lady will have taken an illegal copy of it by now, even though the highest available resolution online is only 2500 pi square (I think). The one I can't actually afford to print for myself is 5000 pi square.
I thought I uploaded an actual segment of Merelan City FCW somewhere about the site? If not then maybe I should do a tutorial at some point. I really must finish this style first, though. I have too many half finished projects lying around as it is. I don't want to add an entire style to that pile or I'll never go back to any of it.
I did more or less the same job on Scribble rock, just slightly different colour variation of it. I'm certain I uploaded a sample of that one?
The problem with most of my FCWs is that I use a lot of my own textures - even as early on as Merelan city, the seaweed and rock were my own textures. In fact, because you don't have Bogie's Mapping Objects you won't have the sand either. And I think the grit was BMO as well. Which means that you would only have been able to see the water layers. The exact shade and tone of the sand is more important than you think in that effect. It has to be very pale and exactly the right shade of warm yellow-grey for the water to look right
The way I envisage using any of these textures is mixed together with each other and various edge fade effects in operation (which is why they are going to have to be tested quite rigorously for transparency acne before I call them all finished). For example, I would probably have dozens of ragged patches of the dead grass breaking up the edge of the desert sand as a sort of do-it-yourself scrubland. Dot a few dead bushes around and its done. I think doing stuff like that by hand is more natural looking than creating a scrubland texture with ready made bushes, because you can dot the bushes along the wadis, and dot little rock symbols on the plateaus. (Not that I'm criticising my favourite HW style
BMO is covered by a similar EULA. Its just a separate document from the CSUAC one, and therefore wasn't involved in that little mess where I ended up deleting the CSUAC
You still don't have the seaweed or the rocks. Those are ones I made. I uploaded them here, but you aren't likely to have stored them in the same folder in the same place as I've got them, even if you downloaded them.
Don't worry - I'll have a root around in the archives today and *sea* what I can find :P
I hardly ever use the tiles in BMO, but before I started making my own grass textures I used two of the three grass fills almost exclusively practically everywhere, only cussing the fact that they only come in HI resolution, and not VH, like the PF fills.
The most frequently used symbols I use from that set are the canoes and rowing boats. The flat stone bridge is an absolute favourite. You can never have enough of that little stone bridge and its ruined brother
I've been working on these textures as a set all day to try and bring them into line with each other as far as colour is concerned.
I would love to know what you think. Are any of them a bit bright/dull? Do you think one or two of them just don't go with the set? Are any of them so garishly horrible that you really dare not say what you really think? :P
That's great, since I know how sensitive you are to colour and its use
Hmmm.... grey sand?
Ok, but I'll make it a separate texture to the existing one. I could also do a more reddish/pinkish version. Sand comes in all shades in a desert, depending on what minerals are being leached or cooked to oxide. Iron (rust) is what makes some parts of the Sahara red...
And this is where I blush quite hotly, since I admit to asking Ralf for the list of fills and symbols that are required to make up an annual edition. It all remains to be seen if they fit the bill when I'm done - Ralf's decision, as you know.
If they aren't quite right for an annual, I could always take Remy up on his offer of hosting it all, so that people can download them and add to their collection?
I can't wait to see what you've done for your Annual
EDIT: I've got a very long way to go yet. I might have a go at the swamp, tundra, marsh, volcanic fills next, but after that I've still got to do all the symbols... and then the fills that involve using the symbols or matching the fills harmoniously to the individual symbol style - the individual trees and the forest fills and so on. I'm still intending to do four seasons for the temperate region maps
Some look a bit 'flat' to me. I can see texture, bumps; in desert, grass dead, mountain background, and the middle one on the bottom row. There are no names there.
I'm kinda certain I said something else, but its gone fomr my mind.
I think an autosave for typed text, so if someone, particularly me, who needs to recover text, can do so. May not be available though. What I have seen on other forums is it only keeps the text for less than 5 minutes.
I think I really need to make a sort of 'master map' of the set as I go, so that I can see what's lacking on an actual map, instead of trying to get things to work in blocks of little squares :P
Ok. I'll add a few more and then work on a map with them all together
I think I will try to keep the sheer number of textures down to a reasonable maximum, since its always possible to adjust the hue quite a lot with an HSL sheet effect, but yes, I will do at least one more sand variation.
The flatness you see in the tiny squares above may in some relatively large part be down to the extreme reduction in size. They do look a lot flatter in that image than they really are at full size