Fantasy Ocean Shores

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Hi everyone,

This month at the Cartographer's Guild I entered the lite competition to map someplace or something in our hometown. At first I was going to do a fantasy version of my RV but decided to go bigger and do a fantasy version of my hometown. So this is it. The fantasy version of Ocean Shores.

Enjoy

Lorelei · January 2018

Tony, this is great. The blur effect you used on the eastern shore is fantastic! I can SEE the dip of the oceans floor....however....is the land actually green? I would think there is some kind of a sandy shore there - so I trace the coast and add a bit of a shore on each side in a sandy color with a fade edge effect. Otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing, its wonderful.

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Thanks Lorelie. It is green when the tide comes in. When it goes out faaar away from the city, then it turns sandy. The sand doesn't start until you get way away from the city. I'm not quite sure why that is, this is a weird place. All of the pictures I see of it online are always with the tide out and in the summertime when it isn't poring down rain. So then it looks sandy. In the winter though, it doesn't snow. And when the water comes right up over whatever that green/brown stuff is on the beach, then to me, the whole beach looks green. But I guess I could try putting a patch of sand in there and see if I can get things to work better.

On the other side, it is green all the time as the water is actually a harbor and that side never changes. It goes right up over a bunch of plants and muck and other stuff and always looks weird. Even when you look at it on google earth, it has a weird green effect to it.

Lorelei · January 2018

Well don't change it if it's really green....I just found it odd....but then again, i'm on the Atlantic Coast where all the shoreline is sandy

Are you in the Pacific Northwest? Where is this Ocean Shores?

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Yeah, I'm in the pacific northwest. I live on the most west coast you can get to in the lower 48. There is sand out there but it looks nothing like most of the white beaches around the world. It is more of a dingy brown type sand, or a granite gray colored sand.

Oh, I just realized, I forgot to put trees on the ocean side. I'll have to fix that. Well, more like bushes really.

ScottA · January 2018

Looks really nice, and I also really like that fade into the ocean. My only quibble would be the waves on the western shore. They're too perfect and straight, like tracks. I think breaking them up would look better.

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

So this would be the town with the tree line. Which one do you like better?

Loopysue · January 2018

Those waves.... Hmmm...

They are incredibly hard-edged.

How about replacing them with hand drawn lines of white on a separate sheet, and a very slight blur effect? A bit like the waves in my MC map. I think I left them in on that MC ocean file I uploaded just recently?

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Thanks ScottA. It was the only way I could think of to represent waves at the time.

Thanks Sue! I'd forgotten about that! Now I'm going to have to change it up to just like you said!

What do you guys think of the thin line of trees?

Loopysue · January 2018

I'm undecided about them. They look smaller than the rest of the trees, which feels a bit odd.

I assure you, though, that I do have some very funny ideas about keeping overland symbols the same relative size (except for mountains) :P You will probably be quite safe ignoring me.

Loopysue · January 2018

Try putting one of those wave lines right on the edge of the water. I find that although water is transparent its more convincing if there's just a very thin suggestion, barely visible, of the edge of its extent. Whether its sand/mud/plant growth, most things look darker when they are wet, which is why I also didn't fade the water out to nothing. I think I went from 100% in the middle to about 30% at the edge? Can't remember without looking!

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Thanks Sue, Yeah, those symbols are smaller because the trees that are near the ocean are the exact same kind found around the rest of ocean shores, but they are smaller. I think it has something to do with those trees using saltwater from the ocean instead of the freshwater that the rest of the trees more inland dig down for. All I know is that it is very weird to look at in real life.

I'll try that thin line and see what it does. I'm going to use a real picture from google earth and try to recreate those waves a bit.

Thanks again for your help with oceans

ScottA · January 2018

Everything seems to be in rigid lines -- waves, walls, buildings, trees. Walls and buildings are man-made and follow streets, but natural things tend to be very random, so maybe randomizing some of the elements a bit would be good, too.

Also, I like that font but it is hard to read. Maybe the size could be increased a bit?

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

@ ScottA: Well, my town is on a very thin peninsula and you should go look at it on google earth. You will see that the randomness of the trees is just about right for the town. The town also doesn't really look anything like my map does, because I only did the center of town and had to make it look a little more fantasy. From a top down view you can see that everything goes in almost straight lines right down the peninsula. It is almost a completely manicured looking town from the air. The funny thing is, when you are driving through town you can't see near as many of the houses as trees are in the way all over the place and it looks sort of chaotic. But I think it was designed to look that way. It is the only place I've seen where the trees and bushes look all chaotic when you are really looking at them but have a sort of order when looked at from the air. But I will try to randomize it a bit more on the forest near the ocean.

But the pictures they have on google earth were taken this summer during the day when the tide was out and you can see all of the vehicles on the beach and the waves crashing in long lines down the beach. It is really interesting to look at if you get close enough. There are canals running all through the southern part of the town too. That is the part I didn't map.

The text actually looks really good on the guild website. I think it is just because we can only upload 1.90 MB files here as to the text being unreadable.

Anyway, here is a different set of waves added. I tried to make them look sort of like they do on google earth but I'm having a bit of issue with the blur. But I think the blur is good enough for this.

What do you guys think?

Loopysue · January 2018

The blur looks good - a lot better than the symbols

I would add another sheet with only about half the blur and draw a very fine line along the water's edge, and maybe just a dash of a line here and there along the crests of the waves?

Something to give it just a tad more focus

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Ok. I did draw one line across the waters edge. The blur made it disappear so I had to make it bigger. With this new one I hope it makes things look just perfect. Thank you Sue

Loopysue · January 2018

Don't forget the other water's edge on the other side of the land

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Haha, ok Sue, I didn't forget. But I changed the treeline as ScottA suggested too. Then something happened. I realized that with such a small area, no matter what I did it seemed the trees would sort of end up in a pattern. So instead, I went looking for a fill style that might help. Then I ran across the Herwin Weilink scrubland fill style. I figured it was worth a shot. It turns out that the scrub fill looks much better I think and sort of gives it that beach feel.

So how's this one look?

ScottA · January 2018

Oh, well, I was just offering suggestions. My opinions don't really mean anything! lol! Especially when you have the Maestra offering her brilliant tutelage! Soak it up, she has so much to share!

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Lol, well ScottA you were right. they did look too much like a pattern and I didn't necessarily like it but I needed something to represent scrubrush so the closest thing I could think of was trees. Then I remembered we had the fill style for that with little scrub brush all over it. I think it improved the look of the map. Thank you for your suggestion

Without it I would have just settled on the trees.

Loopysue · January 2018

Maestro?

LOL! Don't mind me. I'm just a very opinionated person

You all know better than to take me too seriously :P

(and here comes another one!)

Perhaps try taking that water's edge blur down a few more notches, but otherwise a thousand times better than the original

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

It's already at 1. I tried .5 but I saw no difference. And thank you.

Next, I'm going to upload some close up pictures of some of the buildings that I built for this. Virtually every building was made in Perspectives 3. The castle was first drawn in Perspectives 3, then the Herwin Weilink Isometric Dungeon wall symbols were put on it to give it that great looking giant brick/rock look. Then the doors for the keep are from the Temple of Bones set. The buildings have been given little tidbits to make them stand out from the buildings I've made in the past so these look a bit better.

Loopysue · January 2018

Oh, right....

I think that's why I work with larger base maps - about 5000 map units square. That way, although you have to use large numbers to get a decent edge fade, you can do much finer adjustments at the smaller end of the scale. For example, on one of my maps that blur would have been at least 50, leaving me with the option of reducing it by half several times over.

I keep forgetting that everyone works much smaller than I do!

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

I would work much larger except for one thing. I truly suck at maths. So making a map that large would mean tons of math for me to convert every symbol to the larger map and I really don't know if my brain would be able to function after attempting something like that.

I'm sure it is a chore normally but I couldn't even imagine trying to attempt something like that with perspectives 3!

Loopysue · January 2018

I have to admit that I haven't even opened that particular birthday present yet!

I've been too busy doing other stuff.

Are you going to make a set of ISO building symbols? I think they might be really popular. Several times, both here and over at the Guild, people have asked if there are any ISO city sets and so on.

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Funny you should ask Sue, Here we go, the start of five new iso buildings that I used in my map.

First, the regular tudor house that I've made and everyone knows.

Monsen · January 2018

Posted By: LoopysueI think that's why I work with larger base maps - about 5000 map units square. That way, although you have to use large numbers to get a decent edge fade, you can do much finer adjustments at the smaller end of the scale.

For making actual maps, this is actually bad advice. The size should always be correct depending on the "real world" size of the place you are mapping. Anything else means that all information from CC3+ (coordinates, lengths, distances, etc) is wrong. All distances in effects support decimal numbers, so there is no good reason to artificially increase map size to get precision, it is just as easy to halve the number 1 as the number 50. It is also easier to set the right effect number from the start, because if you need a 1-foot edge fade in a city map (imperial scale), the size of the edge fade would be 1, since that too follows the map units.

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Next, A tudor style manse.

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Next, a Tudor Style Tavern

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

Next a Tudor style Coaching Inn ( I was recently informed on the CC3+ facebook group that a coaching inn is 260 feet wide. If only I had known I would have made it that size.)

Tonnichiwa · January 2018

A little closer up on the door

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Fantasy Ocean Shores

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