Time investment in laying mountains.
I am creating my first map, and it is a very large world map; 7,000 miles wide by 5,600 miles high.
I am already generally a meticulous person when it comes doing almost any kind of task or project. With my job, social life, appointments, and all that other real life good stuff, it took me TWO WEEKS to finish laying down all the mountain ranges in this world I'm creating.
The way that I created the mountain ranges, was I used the contours tool first, to lay out where I want to place the mountains, then I used Mountain symbols, to plop down individual mountains together, overlapping them.
For the future, when I create other worlds, I would like to find a more efficient way to lay down mountain ranges, that still allows for enough detailed control, and will still be aesthetically pleasing enough to the eyes. I don't think simply using mountain-colored/patterned contours to simply splash down areas meant for mountains, will cut it for me. Unless someone knows of a technique that uses some feature/tool with the terrain contours, that complement one another, and makes the mountain ranges visually pleasing enough??
Attached to this post, is a file image that shows the entire map of the large world I'm creating. I am open to suggestions on how to shorten the time for laying out mountain ranges for future large worlds I may create. Thank you in advance.
I am already generally a meticulous person when it comes doing almost any kind of task or project. With my job, social life, appointments, and all that other real life good stuff, it took me TWO WEEKS to finish laying down all the mountain ranges in this world I'm creating.
The way that I created the mountain ranges, was I used the contours tool first, to lay out where I want to place the mountains, then I used Mountain symbols, to plop down individual mountains together, overlapping them.
For the future, when I create other worlds, I would like to find a more efficient way to lay down mountain ranges, that still allows for enough detailed control, and will still be aesthetically pleasing enough to the eyes. I don't think simply using mountain-colored/patterned contours to simply splash down areas meant for mountains, will cut it for me. Unless someone knows of a technique that uses some feature/tool with the terrain contours, that complement one another, and makes the mountain ranges visually pleasing enough??
Attached to this post, is a file image that shows the entire map of the large world I'm creating. I am open to suggestions on how to shorten the time for laying out mountain ranges for future large worlds I may create. Thank you in advance.
Comments
@Phantom077: When I make large scale maps, the most important thing to avoid this is to make sure the symbols are not too small. On a world map, you won't use one symbol for each individual mountain, but rather as a representation of a mountain range. Generally, I never optimize the visuals of my maps for deep zooms, rather I would make separate detailed maps of interesting areas that have greater detail (linking them by hyperlinks, so the detailed map is just a mouse click away). By using this technique, you can ensure you don't have to map out every area on your world map in great detail, which quickly leads to lots of time used and potential burnout before the map is done. Also, if your symbols are too small, it very quickly leads to a map that ends up looking great when zoomed in, but cluttered when zoomed out, but zoomed out is usually the way you most often would view a world map, so that should really be the view where the map looks it's nicest.
I generally use 4-5 detail levels for my maps: World Map - region/country map - local area map - city/village street maps - floorplans/dungeon/battle maps
I did not realize some of the limitations that CC3+ had and also started with a detailed map that is 10,000 x 12,000.
I worked out a way to do it, but it is like Monsen said, it will be cluttered and hard to "read" as a world map.
I did some test printing, and I will have to print the map as a 4x6 foot table map or a 5x8 foot table map to get it to look good.
I have a 5x8 gaming table.
As such, I am going about this sort of backwards.
I am going detailed maps first, then regional, and then world.
I will then follow up with local/urban maps/dungeon/building maps.
You may have seen the post already, but we explored some ways of making mountain ranges in a recent post: http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=5418&page=1#Item_27
Monsen has been a great help and has a lot of experience.
Monsen, for large maps like Phantom077 and mine, what scale do you recommend for symbols on our world maps?
Thanks