ProFantasy Community Forum

Recreating an Old Hand-Drawn Map?

midienmidien
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
Hello, everyone! My first post here, and I'm still a pretty big newbie to the software. The learning curve seems to be going well enough, but I had a question that I didn't seem to find an answer to in the search - If I missed it somewhere, sorry! I still hope some of you guys might be able to help.

I started working on a map for this world I've been building, and initially I was doing the whole thing by hand. That... involved a giant piece of posterboard, a commercial-grade scanner, Photoshop, and a LOT of time. I've got the outlines of the major continents, some islands, etc. all sorted out, but I wanted something to help make it a little easier to finish. Is there a way to import something like a huge .jpg to use as a starting point for a map? Or am I reduced to essentially free-handing this if I want to put it into the software?

Halp! and thank you for any advice. :D
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  • SvenSven
    edited December 2013
    I usually take my old map or illustration & create a new sheet & layers specifically for holding the map (I usually call it TRACING). I convert the picture to a GIF format in an outside program. I also turn off the Snap & Grid functions in CC3. Then (via the toolbar along the top top edge) select: DRAW, INSERT FILE, select the file in the dialog box to select the actual file I want to use. The task will then return to the map & starting at the upper left corner of where you want to insert the picture, you drag right & down to expand the illustration to where you want. I can then use it to draw over on the other sheets & layers & re-position the traceing sheat/layer to different sheet levels as I work with the various layers. When I'm done I just hide the tracing sheet & voila the map is an improvement on the original & can fully make use of the Sheet-effects as desire.
    Here is one that I did for an upcoming magazine based on the WW2 battle of Kasserine Pass. I used a satellite image as my tracing to better get the terrain clearer & used period references to clean things up & run it back 70's years of change.

    & no I didn't use the 1930 annual style, but rather my own style I've been using for years now. But if you want to try my style, the 1930's Baedecker style that is featured in the Annual 84 - 1930 Overland style is a good place to start as we were inspired by similar sources. The military icons are ones I created from scratch myself using both US Army & NATO standard icons for my source.
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  • midienmidien
    Thank you so very much, especially for all of the detail! This pretty much solved that problem completely. I'd run out of room on my original hand-drawn poster page, so the bottom half of the map was left unfinished. I found how to use one of the open fractal landscape edges to finish off the bottom and have it look very similar to the rest, so I'm extremely happy with it!

    Now comes the next part, though, where I try to figure out how to -fill in-. Without the PNG layer below, all I have is the outline from the PATH tool, and have yet to sort out where one goes to fill in all that space. Most of the fills I've found so far would require me to completely re-draw the landscapes, and I don't actually want to do that. I've added a picture, if it's any help.

    You can also see another problem that's cropped up in there. It seems that somehow, after I'd been faithfully using the PATH tool and it's ON option to attach edges of the lines and making sure they touched (and nowhere leaving any of those gaps like that)... I had a problem where I hadn't set the fill to solid? So when I upped the size of the lines, the line became green. I selected each section with EDIT PROPERTIES, and changed each section to 'FILL 90' instead of the landscape texture for the line... and now this. This is even AFTER I've done re-draws and added a glow. What's going on, here? D: Granted I've learned a lot thus far, but I'd hope that I wouldn't have to start over! xD
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  • midienmidien
    Wow, maybe the horrible little gaps are just due to the sheer scale of the thing. O_o I zoomed in MASSIVELY far to try to fiddle with a few things, and now I don't see them any longer. Odd!
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  • midienmidien
    It was suggested to me to try working with Line to Path/Combine Paths/Path to Poly, but those unfortunately aren't seeming to do what I need, either. While I can get Combine Paths to work (seemingly) with the fractal line portions I added at the bottom of the map, NONE of these seem to even allow me to select the other outline path portions that I traced by hand with the PATH tool. D:
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  • SvenSven
    I've encountered that with fractals so I've just been using normal paths. I also start with different sheets & layers depending on the complexity. In my example above note that there's the background sheet, then the contours were drawn using 10% Fill as solid (line width 0) shapes. After I all all the contours I desire, I then do an "Outline in black" (or whatever color sing the right click to select. I then do a symbols along to add the hatching to the contours.

    Sköl,
    Sven
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  • midienmidien
    Woohoo! Success! Thank you very much. With that, I managed to finally get the fractals I wanted to trace added to the picture's PNG sheet, and got it traced onto the main LAND sheet with the rest of my outlines!

    I think I was hoping that I'd be able to fill in the outlines with a color or something once I had them drawn, but I may have to get rid of the background and revert to black and white. Is there any way to do plain color fills? I suppose I was hoping there would be something akin to the paint bucket tool xD although I may have missed it in the documentation, if there is a way.

    I keep trying to combine the paths used to edge the continents, though, and it just WILL NOT let me combine them. I can't EXPLODE and then COMBINE PATHS, either, and all the PATH TO POLY does is make weird lines through my continents when I try to select more than one path on a continent. O_o
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  • JimPJimP 🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
    edited December 2013
    Instead of drawing a Hollow, draw a Solid. That will fill in the area.

    Upper right of CC3. Look for FS, that is the Fill Style requestor. Click on it.

    You can select different styles, or by clicking on Bitmap files, you can select ocean, dirt, grasslands, etc.

    I know there is something else to do, to get you from what you have to what I mentioned, but my apologies, I don't know how to get there.
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