Both more space between tussocks, and a bit more between dead and arid - could have a sparse grass fill. (we had a history teacher who was totally bald at age 30, and in typically sensitive teenage boy manner, we called him Sparse Grass! )
Well that's better than 4-eyes, which is what I used to get as the youngest spectacle wearer in school - aged 6
Ill see what I can do, but I'm making no promises yet.
In the meantime. I'm having a day off being sensible. This is a reject texture I've been playing with for the last hour. Its not meant to be anything at all. I just thought it was pretty - something a bit more interesting than a comment without any wallpaper
Well, like colored hollow circles, I suppose. Maybe like some agates you see? If you've seen pictures of the US badlands the hills and mountains have these lovely layers of red and brown and tan. It's quite pretty. So if you could somehow add colors to the pattern it would have a similar look from an aerial view.
I agree with Scott - definitely badlands. A bit lighter, and it could also do for clay dirt desert (plenty of those here). And i was called 4-eyes too, for exactly the same reason. I was 7 at the time.
Another possibility with that one, Sue, is to lighten it to a sandy color but keep the circular patterns a little darker for a desert fill with mesas. Would also require a lot of work by hand...
This is a larger scale version with sort of the right colours for Badlands
[Image_10160]
But I can see something that you can't...
The trouble with doing highly detailed fills of this type is that the redundancy is absolutely terrible. The repeat pattern is just horrendous if you tile this more than about 3 side by side at full scale.
What if (now that I've got the general idea, thanks to you and Quenten) I make a small set of badland hills in this sort of style that will be shaded hills - like the mountains? You could then put them wherever you liked on one of the rather sick looking grass fills. (I noticed from that photograph that there are slightly wider valleys in places, and that they have a kind of sick yellow grey grass in them)
Interesting. I was called 4-eyes to in elementary school and later on.
Don't know this could be done, but clay soil cracks when the rains don't show up. Its like pieces of the surface brak apart, and the edges lift away from the soil below.
The badlands one you posted could work for this.
Here is one of many exampls I found by searching for 'dry cracked soil'. This is about 20% of a 2700 pixel photo.
Yes, Sue, I agree with you about the problem of overly-detailed fills and how bad they look when used in large areas where the pattern repeats. Such areas really are better done with symbols than fills, although HW has a badlands fill, but his style works. Same goes for things like sand dunes and anything else that repeats patterns on large scales. Or instead of symbols, maybe a hill pattern like in the HW set but with the badlands coloring? That might work. Or you can just forget it altogether. Not sure how much call there is for badlands fills. I just saw that one and liked it and thought of that right away...!
BTW, that one is really pretty! Got the colors down for sure.
@Jim - cracked soil is more of a battle map scale than a regional map scale, but since you asked I knocked this one up for you (I had to upload it as a jpg. Let me know if you want it, but can't convert it, and I will upload it over at the Guild as a png - same size, and give you a link to it.
[Image_10166]
@Scott - I don't think I will do badland and hills fills. I think they are much better expressed as symbols.
But don't worry, now I've taken the trouble to get a nice colour for them I kind of quite like the "Badland hill" symbol collection idea - a little something that will be different to all the other styles
I like that cracked soil. I have several I've done and as Sue says, they are more for battle maps and small areas like dungeons or maybe towns than larger regional areas.
I love the idea of a small set of badlands hills, Sue, and having something totally unique from any other symbol set is a big plus. Every set has mountains, and many have mesas, but none have offered badlands hills (or tepuis mountains, which I am playing around with right now)... It's nice to have available different and "non-standard" stuff.
I think a top down shaded version of them would work really nicely
That will be on the Shaded Mountains thread eventually but for now I'm just plodding on with the textures, since I think its important to finish them first. They kind of set the colour scheme for everything else. Have you ever noticed how closely related all the colours are in the HW style, for example. Its actually a very restricted colour scheme, which I always totally mess up by using a whole raft of HSL sheet effects to make it my own colour! :P
I really like the very somber color pallet of the HW style. When I first got CC3+ and was exploring the different style sets something kept drawing me back to that one. Now it's my favorite, default style.
That's the really tricky bit - getting the right pattern, the right contrast, the right colour, and the right scale. And then you have to make sure that even if you put the two most unlikely textures right next to each other they will still look ok.
Its easy to go too far into the safe zone. That's why when they are postage stamp sized some of the textures look a bit bland. I dare say I will go through at least 20 revisions of each texture, possibly more, before I get the whole set right. It makes you realise just how much work went into creating all the existing styles!
Bearing all of that in mind, here are a few I've been working on tonight.
Desert white_SD
[Image_10167]
Desert red_SD
[Image_10168]
Land red_SD
[Image_10169]
Land green_SD
[Image_10170]
Land volcanic_SD
[Image_10171]
Snow_SD
[Image_10172]
Another screen shot of them all together (I'm going to have to start that map I've been talking about to do a 'field test' soon)
I hope I'm heading in the right direction with the grass
I don't think there's a single texture I haven't opened and tweaked tonight/last night (its dawn). I've reduced the intensity of the water textures and tried to increase the patterns on the land textures.
Its like trimming the legs off a table without anything to measure them with - a bit off here.... a bit off there... oh, and look, I need to cut a bit more off the first one again!
Question: Do you think I'm drifting dangerously close to the colour scheme of the HW style?
'Dangerously' for two reasons - firstly I don't want to mimic or copy someone else's work, and its not really much use to just vaguely reproduce an existing style. I've tried to keep a lot more red in my fills, since that's the colour I always seem to feel like adding to some of the HW styles, but at the same time I'm also reducing that red a lot with each new revision. Its a very difficult colour to get right. Our eyes and brains have evolved to recognise red as being either dangerous like a poisonous creature, or, (conversely) good to eat like ripe strawberries, so its the first thing we notice - how red and what kind of red something is or is not. Green, on the other hand... we are remarkable insensitive to changes in shades of green. It is unlikely that anyone noticed the relatively severe 'blue shift' in the Sea green fill :P
Too close to the HW color pallet? Well, to me I always get a sense of grey from the HW set, whereas I comprehend more yellow in what you are going, which might have to do with your tinkering with red? I'm not an artist so don't fully understand the interconnections of the color wheel... But red is my favorite color, and I, too, always seem to end up with a lot of red tones in my work (reds, oranges, purples).
Shades to the warm side (olive, yellow, orange, red) were what I was aiming for, without going anywhere close to 'garish'. Of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from changing the colour with a handy HSL sheet effect if my preferences aren't quite the same as theirs
I'm not happy with that 'Ice' fill. Still working on it!
Have a pretty good approximation to pack ice atm. Maybe there needs to be a separate glacier ice, and pack ice?
Posted By: LoopysueMaybe there needs to be a separate glacier ice, and pack ice?
All I can say to that is, that the more different fill styles, the more options for the mapper. Lots of different fills are never bad. (Except possibly for the artist making them all)
Well, unless there's a limit to the number of fills a style can have, I've got hundreds of the things! Mostly they're rejected attempts at the ones I've already uploaded, but some are ok.
I have seen, in an aircraft report on a drought in Texas in the early 1950s, cracked soil going on for square miles. But not many cracks couldn't be seen at 1,200 feet, the height the aircraft was flying.
Posted By: Loopysueunless there's a limit to the number of fills a style can have
No real practical limit as far as I know, the main issue is download size of the pack. Since fills are only referenced from the map, it won't affect .fcw size.
Comments
The dead grass is maybe a better colour - or perhaps somewhere between the two?
Well that's better than 4-eyes, which is what I used to get as the youngest spectacle wearer in school - aged 6
Ill see what I can do, but I'm making no promises yet.
In the meantime. I'm having a day off being sensible. This is a reject texture I've been playing with for the last hour. Its not meant to be anything at all. I just thought it was pretty - something a bit more interesting than a comment without any wallpaper
Cells around the blobs? Scratch like grooves that ignore the base pattern?
(You're going to have to help me here!)
Thank you
I hadn't been looking at it that way before, but I can see what you mean.
The way its created is going to make it a bit difficult to do, but I may just hand paint the basic export in Krita to get the desired effect.
Odd that I accidentally struck on a suitable pattern, and a suitable brownish white base!
And i was called 4-eyes too, for exactly the same reason. I was 7 at the time.
For now, however, it really is high time I got to bed!
This is a larger scale version with sort of the right colours for Badlands
[Image_10160]
But I can see something that you can't...
The trouble with doing highly detailed fills of this type is that the redundancy is absolutely terrible. The repeat pattern is just horrendous if you tile this more than about 3 side by side at full scale.
What if (now that I've got the general idea, thanks to you and Quenten) I make a small set of badland hills in this sort of style that will be shaded hills - like the mountains? You could then put them wherever you liked on one of the rather sick looking grass fills. (I noticed from that photograph that there are slightly wider valleys in places, and that they have a kind of sick yellow grey grass in them)
Don't know this could be done, but clay soil cracks when the rains don't show up. Its like pieces of the surface brak apart, and the edges lift away from the soil below.
The badlands one you posted could work for this.
Here is one of many exampls I found by searching for 'dry cracked soil'. This is about 20% of a 2700 pixel photo.
BTW, that one is really pretty! Got the colors down for sure.
[Image_10166]
@Scott - I don't think I will do badland and hills fills. I think they are much better expressed as symbols.
But don't worry, now I've taken the trouble to get a nice colour for them I kind of quite like the "Badland hill" symbol collection idea - a little something that will be different to all the other styles
I love the idea of a small set of badlands hills, Sue, and having something totally unique from any other symbol set is a big plus. Every set has mountains, and many have mesas, but none have offered badlands hills (or tepuis mountains, which I am playing around with right now)... It's nice to have available different and "non-standard" stuff.
That will be on the Shaded Mountains thread eventually but for now I'm just plodding on with the textures, since I think its important to finish them first. They kind of set the colour scheme for everything else. Have you ever noticed how closely related all the colours are in the HW style, for example. Its actually a very restricted colour scheme, which I always totally mess up by using a whole raft of HSL sheet effects to make it my own colour! :P
That's the really tricky bit - getting the right pattern, the right contrast, the right colour, and the right scale. And then you have to make sure that even if you put the two most unlikely textures right next to each other they will still look ok.
Its easy to go too far into the safe zone. That's why when they are postage stamp sized some of the textures look a bit bland. I dare say I will go through at least 20 revisions of each texture, possibly more, before I get the whole set right. It makes you realise just how much work went into creating all the existing styles!
Bearing all of that in mind, here are a few I've been working on tonight.
Desert white_SD
[Image_10167]
Desert red_SD
[Image_10168]
Land red_SD
[Image_10169]
Land green_SD
[Image_10170]
Land volcanic_SD
[Image_10171]
Snow_SD
[Image_10172]
Another screen shot of them all together (I'm going to have to start that map I've been talking about to do a 'field test' soon)
[Image_10173]
I hope I'm heading in the right direction with the grass
I don't think there's a single texture I haven't opened and tweaked tonight/last night (its dawn). I've reduced the intensity of the water textures and tried to increase the patterns on the land textures.
Its like trimming the legs off a table without anything to measure them with - a bit off here.... a bit off there... oh, and look, I need to cut a bit more off the first one again!
Ice_SD
[Image_10174]
'Dangerously' for two reasons - firstly I don't want to mimic or copy someone else's work, and its not really much use to just vaguely reproduce an existing style. I've tried to keep a lot more red in my fills, since that's the colour I always seem to feel like adding to some of the HW styles, but at the same time I'm also reducing that red a lot with each new revision. Its a very difficult colour to get right. Our eyes and brains have evolved to recognise red as being either dangerous like a poisonous creature, or, (conversely) good to eat like ripe strawberries, so its the first thing we notice - how red and what kind of red something is or is not. Green, on the other hand... we are remarkable insensitive to changes in shades of green. It is unlikely that anyone noticed the relatively severe 'blue shift' in the Sea green fill :P
Too close to the HW color pallet? Well, to me I always get a sense of grey from the HW set, whereas I comprehend more yellow in what you are going, which might have to do with your tinkering with red? I'm not an artist so don't fully understand the interconnections of the color wheel... But red is my favorite color, and I, too, always seem to end up with a lot of red tones in my work (reds, oranges, purples).
Shades to the warm side (olive, yellow, orange, red) were what I was aiming for, without going anywhere close to 'garish'. Of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from changing the colour with a handy HSL sheet effect if my preferences aren't quite the same as theirs
I'm not happy with that 'Ice' fill. Still working on it!
Have a pretty good approximation to pack ice atm. Maybe there needs to be a separate glacier ice, and pack ice?
I have seen, in an aircraft report on a drought in Texas in the early 1950s, cracked soil going on for square miles. But not many cracks couldn't be seen at 1,200 feet, the height the aircraft was flying.
That reminds me of another question that I've been meaning to ask, but always seem to forget.
What sort of an area are overland fill styles supposed to represent? Are we talking sides that are 50 miles, or 100 miles?
I used Natalya Faden's Oljan maps and textures to make my overland map rectangles of 180x234 miles.
Natalya Faden's textures and map