Have you ever noticed how mountains, hills and trees are usually done side-view, while settlements, bridges and ships are done more isometrically?
I think mesas vary from style to style, but these don't half look odd in comparison with my side-view mountains and hills.
I need to have a careful think about whether to opt for side or isometric view and make the symbols agree with each other.
But then I think of existing sets and realise that perspective isn't always the same between the symbols of the same set. There are often side-view mountains with isometric towns and cities.
I've always called them mesas, and it seems that Americans have generally always called them buttes.
Since I am European I'm more convinced than ever that this is a regional or cultural difference, and its only by chance that these things were called mesas in earlier overland symbol sets.
Maybe I will just call them "Mountain flat-top 01" etc :P
If you go by Wikipedia, they have a simple definition:
"In differentiating mesas and buttes, geographers use the rule of thumb that a mesa has a top that is wider than its height, while a butte has a top that is narrower than its height."
Ah, Scott. The truth is it doesn't matter to me what they are called as long as they are grouped conveniently and resemble at least some kind of land form that might be useful in a fantasy map. I've seen these mushroom-style forms being used in lots of PS style maps. I think we need more large craters as well. They're on the list. I was thinking about them earlier when I realised I needed to make the edge of a plateau that would go with these mesas... buttes... tepui. I think there may need to be a way of collecting these rock-capped land forms together, separate from the regular cliffs and such things. Maybe I will just Prefix them "RC" for rock capped and have two sets of mountains, cliffs, ravines... etc.
Sorry if that's a bit of a muddle. That's the way my brain works. I think sideways or something. I know its different to normal because normal people give me strange looks when I start to ramble on like that
Looks a bit weird with the top extending so much on them all. While the top is often flat with vertical edges, that part is still smaller than the top of the hill below it on all the images I could find, such as Quenten's pictures above.
Looking at pictures, the height of the plateau on the top do vary quite a bit, some are quite tall, so that would be a suggestion for additional variations. And many seem to have a more broke shape on the top, and not just a "disc". (This is the way of things. You draw something nice, people will demand countless variations. I intend to continue that tradition)
I still need to do more work on them. The join line between the rock and the scree is still wrong. It shouldn't be as straight as that.
Do you mean I should make these all the same height, and do more at a different height? I'm not sure what you mean. I was going to do another 5 that were taller and thinner - more like the pillars in some of the photos Quenten shared.
Still a bit mushroomy - mesas et al do not have overhanging tops at all - in fact, the tops tend to be quite flat. In general, there is a base of sedimentary rock, or softer igneous rock with a 30-45 deg slope, then the "butte' of hard igneous rock, from which the softer rock has eroded, rising 75-90 deg to varying heights which does not overlap the base, then a flat top, maybe with a rise or dip in the middle, but definitely no overhang in most.
In addition, the lines' on the 'butte part are often vertical rather than horizontal as you have shown though both types do exist. The reason is that the butte is an igneous core, and not layers of sedimentary rock or lava flows, which of course gives horizontal layers. However there can be variations, but they are more the exception than the rule. Also, it is because the 'butte' part of the mesa is hard igneous rock that there is usually no vegetation on the sides, but there can be scrub on the top - though generally the top soil is absent or too thin for all but the hardiest plants.
I really do appreciate all the reference images. Thank you
LOL! I assure you there is no overhang now. What seems apparent to me from the images you have shown is that the cap actually slopes back about 5 degrees from the base rather than being vertical as I have drawn them, or is broken into stacks of increasing height towards the main body of the cap. This is a minor adjustment I can do - though I won't be trying to draw the individual tiny stacks. I will just be giving them a tiny slope backwards to give them a more acceptable profile.
The vertical lines are the result of erosion. The rock beds are all horizontal as far as I can see. I could add a couple of vertical lines, but adding a sufficient number to show the wrinkles a bit like the ridges in a bottle cap would make them look equally wrong with the rest of the set (the mountain tests I showed earlier are far too detailed). Thinner lines might work when zoomed in, but they have a tendency to merge on default sized maps (1000 x 800 map units) rendered for printing at 10 x 8 inches on a regular sized piece of paper, and would blur into a single dark mass. To give you an idea of the limits of the level of detail, here is the extract rendered at the exact size they would appear on the printed A4 page export from a default 1000 x 800 map. I did this at the industry standard 300 ppi, above which the human eye can't actually see the additional detail. The full size of the map is 10 x 8 inches.
[Image_13670]
I hope you can see from this that although they are large symbols (as large as the large mountain symbols in the case of the biggest mesa), that level of detail in the rock cap would be impractical even at this scale. And many maps are created much larger than 1000 x 800. There is already not much room to reduce the default size of the symbols for people with larger maps who set the symbol scale a lot less than 1 to get the desired global scale.
These are the desert version. There will be a greener version once I get the basic drawings right - and once I have set the colour scheme for the vegetation and drawn a few trees and a bit of scrub.
Mike Schley seems to think so at least, if his style is anything to go by.
But also remember that symbols in an overland map aren't properly scaled in relation to each other anyway, they are a marker, not an accurate representation, and as such, visibility/clarity is more important than scale.
In the real world, these things seems to range between quire small and enormous as well. I'd just make them the same, and let people scale them if they desire.
According to the rather strange definition I found before you found a better one for me, a mesa suddenly becomes a plateau the moment it is longer or wider than 4 miles - which is less than the base of a really large mountain like Everest (I think, anyway). But you are right - it's legibility rather than correct scale that matters most. The pine trees, for example will probably end up being half the height of the mesas if I'm seeing this right.
The only problem with scaling symbols that have ink lines on them is that the scaling becomes immediately apparent because the lines are much thinner or fatter than on other nearby symbols. I think that is possibly why Mike Schley draws with those broken lines. It doesn't look as bad as if you have an unbroken outline, but I wouldn't want to try and imitate the master.
I have thought (but only thought) about doing this completely ink free to allow for scaling without the ink problem, but that would lead to other problems like the ones you usually get in black and white maps - that of contrast, and having to make sure that things stand out from the background - even if that means they are more artificially coloured than you really want them to be. I have seen this done in styles from other apps, but the usual result is that mountains (for example) are little more than blocks of colour that are either violently darker or lighter than the background just to make them stand out. These mesas would have to be very different without their inking!
Sue, taking your symbols as is: The base is almost right, but it should overlap the butte, not be under it. (because of the way mesas form). And as you say, most mesa bases are vertically funnelled due to erosion.
The plug, or butte is still wrong except for a few which have lowish vertical height (as in elongated ones p see one of my pics above). Most are taller, and range from 75-90 deg angle from the ground. Here your symbols do not show enough height for your base - see pics above. Also see Schley's mesa symbols. Finally, most plugs/buttes are vertically furrowed, because they are mostly volcanic plugs from which the softer rock has eroded. Some do have horizontal furrows, but the majority don't.
Your top is great.
Sorry to be so nitpicky. I will try to draw a diagram tomorrow,
Posted By: QuentenSue, taking your symbols as is: The base is almost right, but it should overlap the butte, not be under it. (because of the way mesas form)...
I can't see any over/under lap anywhere that would justify inclusion in such a tiny representation. I had them wrong to start with, but they now align with the top of the slope, which is what I see when I look at your images. I have yet to tilt them slightly backwards, but that is all I can see needs doing to them
Posted By: Quenten...The plug, or butte is still wrong except for a few which have lowish vertical height (as in elongated ones p see one of my pics above). Most are taller, and range from 75-90 deg angle from the ground. Here your symbols do not show enough height for your base - see pics above. Also see Schley's mesa symbols...
Not sure what you mean. Which bit are you really talking about here? Do you mean the thickness of the cap? Well... that's kind of qualitative and I already have someone else saying they should be thinner over on the FB page (unless he meant a different dimension). A cap can be any depth. It depends on the thickness of the harder rock.
Posted By: Quenten...Finally, most plugs/buttes are vertically furrowed, because they are mostly volcanic plugs from which the softer rock has eroded. Some do have horizontal furrows, but the majority don't...
Oh I see where you have me completely wrong, Quenten. Those horizontal bands of different oranges are rock beds - like layers of sandstone? That's not shading there, but different beds of stone. Three colours - same as the desert textures. I made them that way so they would stand a greater chance of looking right when used with the desert textures. The vertical fluting is just too tiny to be worth drawing. The closest I come to that is with the mesa top right, where you will see the profile of the edge does move in and out on the larger of the two pieces. Smaller details than that are just impractical. If I was doing a painting then yes, I would add every last detail down to the blades of grass, but these things need to be recognizable no matter how tiny they appear on a world map.
I will have a look at them again today and see if I can find some happy medium between what they are, and what they might be, but that might only be quite small adjustments.
I was going to do rocky outcrops next. The mountains I've decided to give a rest for a couple of days while I figure out just how much detail is appropriate by trying other things in the mean time, but rock formations and mesas kind of go together, so I really have to get the mesas right before I move on to rocks.
Ok. This is the finished first draft of the desert mesas.
For now
I've done what I can to get rid of any overhang illusion by removing the line at the base of the cap rock and putting it along the top instead. There are now a few more vertical lines indicating the fluting, and I've slightly reduced the size of the symbols. They were originally as grand in scale as the very largest mountain of the Schley range. I think that's a good benchmark for maximum size for anything in my new set, so I've reduced them to 90% of their original size and redone the inking to maintain the line thickness the same as everything else.
I'm moving back to the mountains now I've finally sorted out the mountain background to be a colour that works with everything else. A very important consideration, and one that took me a while to get just right between working on the mesas.
[Image_13678]
These five are not the only mesas and rock forms I'll be doing. There are a lot more, and some of them may take inspiration from some of the many images you have been kind enough to find for me
Clearly an improvement, looking better and better for each iteration. Still can't wrap my hand around how you manage to draw things like these, but I'll happily make use of them in my maps.
Comments
The perspective issue.
Have you ever noticed how mountains, hills and trees are usually done side-view, while settlements, bridges and ships are done more isometrically?
I think mesas vary from style to style, but these don't half look odd in comparison with my side-view mountains and hills.
I need to have a careful think about whether to opt for side or isometric view and make the symbols agree with each other.
But then I think of existing sets and realise that perspective isn't always the same between the symbols of the same set. There are often side-view mountains with isometric towns and cities.
Since I am European I'm more convinced than ever that this is a regional or cultural difference, and its only by chance that these things were called mesas in earlier overland symbol sets.
Maybe I will just call them "Mountain flat-top 01" etc :P
"In differentiating mesas and buttes, geographers use the rule of thumb that a mesa has a top that is wider than its height, while a butte has a top that is narrower than its height."
Thank you, Remy. For some reason I hadn't come across that. The one mile and four mile rule I came across did seem a bit ridiculous.
I had started to divide mesa and butte drawings, but I think that's a division too far, so there will just be mesas and tepui.
Thanks for that, Joe
Mesa, butte, tepui... might just depend upon where you are..?
Sorry if that's a bit of a muddle. That's the way my brain works. I think sideways or something. I know its different to normal because normal people give me strange looks when I start to ramble on like that
These are not intended to be photorealistic. They are what they are. Overland symbols.
[Image_13662]
And this is how big they would be in a standard 1000 x 800 Overland map exported at 2000 pixels on the long side.
[Image_13663]
I can sort that out, don't worry
Back in about an hour...
Looking at pictures, the height of the plateau on the top do vary quite a bit, some are quite tall, so that would be a suggestion for additional variations. And many seem to have a more broke shape on the top, and not just a "disc". (This is the way of things. You draw something nice, people will demand countless variations. I intend to continue that tradition)
Do you mean I should make these all the same height, and do more at a different height? I'm not sure what you mean. I was going to do another 5 that were taller and thinner - more like the pillars in some of the photos Quenten shared.
In addition, the lines' on the 'butte part are often vertical rather than horizontal as you have shown though both types do exist. The reason is that the butte is an igneous core, and not layers of sedimentary rock or lava flows, which of course gives horizontal layers. However there can be variations, but they are more the exception than the rule. Also, it is because the 'butte' part of the mesa is hard igneous rock that there is usually no vegetation on the sides, but there can be scrub on the top - though generally the top soil is absent or too thin for all but the hardiest plants.
Here are some pics of variants from Wikipaedia.
LOL! I assure you there is no overhang now. What seems apparent to me from the images you have shown is that the cap actually slopes back about 5 degrees from the base rather than being vertical as I have drawn them, or is broken into stacks of increasing height towards the main body of the cap. This is a minor adjustment I can do - though I won't be trying to draw the individual tiny stacks. I will just be giving them a tiny slope backwards to give them a more acceptable profile.
The vertical lines are the result of erosion. The rock beds are all horizontal as far as I can see. I could add a couple of vertical lines, but adding a sufficient number to show the wrinkles a bit like the ridges in a bottle cap would make them look equally wrong with the rest of the set (the mountain tests I showed earlier are far too detailed). Thinner lines might work when zoomed in, but they have a tendency to merge on default sized maps (1000 x 800 map units) rendered for printing at 10 x 8 inches on a regular sized piece of paper, and would blur into a single dark mass. To give you an idea of the limits of the level of detail, here is the extract rendered at the exact size they would appear on the printed A4 page export from a default 1000 x 800 map. I did this at the industry standard 300 ppi, above which the human eye can't actually see the additional detail. The full size of the map is 10 x 8 inches.
[Image_13670]
I hope you can see from this that although they are large symbols (as large as the large mountain symbols in the case of the biggest mesa), that level of detail in the rock cap would be impractical even at this scale. And many maps are created much larger than 1000 x 800. There is already not much room to reduce the default size of the symbols for people with larger maps who set the symbol scale a lot less than 1 to get the desired global scale.
These are the desert version. There will be a greener version once I get the basic drawings right - and once I have set the colour scheme for the vegetation and drawn a few trees and a bit of scrub.
This has raised a point for me. Are these symbols too big anyway?
Are mesa symbols usually as wide as mountain symbols?
But also remember that symbols in an overland map aren't properly scaled in relation to each other anyway, they are a marker, not an accurate representation, and as such, visibility/clarity is more important than scale.
In the real world, these things seems to range between quire small and enormous as well. I'd just make them the same, and let people scale them if they desire.
According to the rather strange definition I found before you found a better one for me, a mesa suddenly becomes a plateau the moment it is longer or wider than 4 miles - which is less than the base of a really large mountain like Everest (I think, anyway). But you are right - it's legibility rather than correct scale that matters most. The pine trees, for example will probably end up being half the height of the mesas if I'm seeing this right.
The only problem with scaling symbols that have ink lines on them is that the scaling becomes immediately apparent because the lines are much thinner or fatter than on other nearby symbols. I think that is possibly why Mike Schley draws with those broken lines. It doesn't look as bad as if you have an unbroken outline, but I wouldn't want to try and imitate the master.
I have thought (but only thought) about doing this completely ink free to allow for scaling without the ink problem, but that would lead to other problems like the ones you usually get in black and white maps - that of contrast, and having to make sure that things stand out from the background - even if that means they are more artificially coloured than you really want them to be. I have seen this done in styles from other apps, but the usual result is that mountains (for example) are little more than blocks of colour that are either violently darker or lighter than the background just to make them stand out. These mesas would have to be very different without their inking!
The plug, or butte is still wrong except for a few which have lowish vertical height (as in elongated ones p see one of my pics above). Most are taller, and range from 75-90 deg angle from the ground. Here your symbols do not show enough height for your base - see pics above. Also see Schley's mesa symbols. Finally, most plugs/buttes are vertically furrowed, because they are mostly volcanic plugs from which the softer rock has eroded. Some do have horizontal furrows, but the majority don't.
Your top is great.
Sorry to be so nitpicky. I will try to draw a diagram tomorrow,
I will have a look at them again today and see if I can find some happy medium between what they are, and what they might be, but that might only be quite small adjustments.
Like This.
Also, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you can't leave the bottom one out! Devils Tower.
I was going to do rocky outcrops next. The mountains I've decided to give a rest for a couple of days while I figure out just how much detail is appropriate by trying other things in the mean time, but rock formations and mesas kind of go together, so I really have to get the mesas right before I move on to rocks.
A search on 'Monument Valley images' will give you a plethora of mesa and butte photos.
For now
I've done what I can to get rid of any overhang illusion by removing the line at the base of the cap rock and putting it along the top instead. There are now a few more vertical lines indicating the fluting, and I've slightly reduced the size of the symbols. They were originally as grand in scale as the very largest mountain of the Schley range. I think that's a good benchmark for maximum size for anything in my new set, so I've reduced them to 90% of their original size and redone the inking to maintain the line thickness the same as everything else.
I'm moving back to the mountains now I've finally sorted out the mountain background to be a colour that works with everything else. A very important consideration, and one that took me a while to get just right between working on the mesas.
[Image_13678]
These five are not the only mesas and rock forms I'll be doing. There are a lot more, and some of them may take inspiration from some of the many images you have been kind enough to find for me