Guide to creating PNG based symbols that work
Hi all,
Long time user of ProFantasy products here dating back to the original CC, and through 2 and Pro, I've only recently properly upgraded to 3. I love it, in general terms, but am having issues with creating my own symbols so they look any good.
I'm not trying to create anything particularly complicated - I just want the ability to create symbols out of the Coats of Arms used for various nations in my campaign, to CC3 maps.
The coats of arms are PNG files - 314 x 414 PNG files. They look fine in their PNG form - nothing fancy, but they do the job. I've created a symbol catalog out of them - and at full size, they look fine. But the further I zoom out, the smaller they get and the worse and more pixellated they look. That doesn't surprise me - except that I note that when I use the official Profantasy symbols, it doesn't seem to happen. Which suggests to me there might be some way I can avoid it if I knew what I was doing. Maybe in the Resolution setting when the Symbol is defined?
Is there any sort of guide out there about this - or any tips from anyone else.
Long time user of ProFantasy products here dating back to the original CC, and through 2 and Pro, I've only recently properly upgraded to 3. I love it, in general terms, but am having issues with creating my own symbols so they look any good.
I'm not trying to create anything particularly complicated - I just want the ability to create symbols out of the Coats of Arms used for various nations in my campaign, to CC3 maps.
The coats of arms are PNG files - 314 x 414 PNG files. They look fine in their PNG form - nothing fancy, but they do the job. I've created a symbol catalog out of them - and at full size, they look fine. But the further I zoom out, the smaller they get and the worse and more pixellated they look. That doesn't surprise me - except that I note that when I use the official Profantasy symbols, it doesn't seem to happen. Which suggests to me there might be some way I can avoid it if I knew what I was doing. Maybe in the Resolution setting when the Symbol is defined?
Is there any sort of guide out there about this - or any tips from anyone else.
Comments
The basic premise here is that the best quality image is of a much higher resolution than you really need for normal viewing of the map, since this image will be used when you zoom close in to some detail. Look for example at the Apple png image in #Symbols\Maps\CC3\Borders. It exists in four different resolutions (VH, HI, LO and VL).
When you use the import png dialog to import images as symbols, you have an option to "create other resolutions", so you basically only need to create the Very High resolution image, and then have CC3 to generate the rest for you.
I then open them up with Windows Paint - I do cleanup, line tweaking, and colorization - then I resave them again as a bitmap file.
I will then move them back into the GIMP - where I can convert them into a transparent .png image.
The images come out to be HUGE in image size and resolution after scanning, which is ok - because Remy Monsen tested a few of the images for me on a test map (thanks Remy), and CC3 scaled them just fine - they looked pretty good as a matter of fact. I didn't really expect that I could more or less leave them as roughly the same resolution - although I suspect that I'll have to resize some specific sets of images to be consistent in dimensions for continuities sake. From what I gather from doing this project thus far is that it "seems" - again thus far - that the larger the source image size - the better.
One thing to remember though is to keep the images created in such a way that there isn't to much fine detail - because you want the images to be recognizable at very small scale sizes, and if you make them too detailed they will look a little garbled if you shrink them down to tiny size.
I need as much info on symbols as I can get my grubby little paws around, lol.