Birdseye Continenal - style development thread
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
Hi everyone! :D
I'll be working on a new top view overland style for the Cartographer's Annual in 2025. If you would like to make any suggestions about what you would like to see, or just want to chat about the possibilities, please feel free to do so on this thread.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.
[Images to come]
Comments
Sounds interesting. Do you have any thoughts on overall style and/or scale you can share yet? Such as, is it intended to be more pictorial (like the Fantasy Realms styles) or more stylised (as modern maps are)? And would it be at a scale where pictorial structures might be useful, aside from landforms and major terrain types? Or are these things still to be decided (and if so, what can of worms have I just opened for you 😎!)?
Right at the moment I'm finishing the last 4-5 symbols for DD4, but I had a rough idea of either mapped mountains and hills (which require things to be done a certain way), or shading done in dungeon fashion, where the steepest slopes are darkest.
I had also thought of structures being slightly fish eye, but not too much. Just enough to show a glimpse of the sides of the buildings at a very oblique angle.
I do like the Fantasy Realms style, but I also think there is room for a style that is kind of half way between that and realism. Think 'relatively free painting from photograph'
It will be very interesting if new style can communicate with some of yours previous styles, for example the beloved Darklands <3
It probably won't, Ricko, because all my previous overland styles are isometric. This one is going to be seen from above - seen as if you are flying over it like a bird.
Ricko has done amazing things mixing Mike Schley’s overland with the city symbols of SS6, since both are isometric. If yours will be top down, I wonder if it could be compatible with your top down Darklands City symbols?
How about some fantasy-type settlements/structures — elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings?
In terms of natural terrain, cliffs and waterfalls are always great. Trickier from above but if they’re slightly fish-eyed I think it would work.
It's only the structures I was thinking of doing fish-eye, and not very much at that. Just enough to show what kind of buildings are under those rooftops.
I promise I will do more structures this time around ;)
Would you like it to be similar in colour scheme to Darklands City?
Would you like it to be similar in colour scheme to Darklands City?
Yea, I personally would love that.
Very much want top down mountains, hills, waterfalls and cliffs.
Those are a given in this kind of style.
Instead of traditional racial structures, perhaps we could follow the influence of Spectrum Overland and use the influence of African, Middle Eastern, American cultures, etc. Something that might break away from medieval fantasy Eurocentrism would be very interesting. Or even the influence of some cartoonist like Moebius, Philippe Druillet, Sergio Toppi, Juan Giménez, Geof Darrow...
And ruins, we like ruins, don't we master Quenten? 😅☠️👻
On that first point, do you think it would be as useful as staying with the European medieval trope? Maybe non-trope structures could be done in a part 2 of some kind.
Ruins have been mentioned in the FB Group as well, so I guess I'd better do some.
And why not reverse the order? then the "European".
Anyway I love beautiful style expansions, just like your Spectrum Overland and Dark land I believe they also deserve new expansions.
(I know the conversation went the other way, but constant expansions like Mike Schkey allow for much more "narrative" resources on the map).
I think I will do the basic European first - just as Mike Schley did. But don't worry - I was already thinking of modern structures as well.
So it follows that there may be a wide range of different kinds of structure in the end.
One of the things that made Spectrum Overland so versatile was that both the hills and the mountains had lush green, arid brown, and snowy white options. I’d love to see lush, arid, and snowy options with this as well.
Of course :)
Since the annual is called Bird Eye point of view, who knows, maybe some images of birds flying alone and in flocks to decorate the map? That would be amazing.
That's an idea.
The name is more of a placeholder for now, so it might change. But that is an interesting idea.
Do the structures necessarily need to be so detailed as to identify specific cultures for an overland-scale style? In a medium-high-level, top-down view (which some folks find very disorienting, because most humans aren't used to seeing things that way), little more than the basic shape is likely to be obvious, and some of the "classic" fantasy tropes will be virtually invisible - as intended to blend in with their surroundings (such as
hobbit- oops - halfling dwellings, other more or less subterranean, dwarf, say, or woodland, e.g. elven, structures). That may depend on whether such things are to be shown significantly over-scale or not, however.Also thinking here of elements like the "Monopoly" board-game houses and hotels, which are very abstract in one sense, but instantly recognisable in another. Perhaps something of that sort might be suitable - with a small series of simple roof-shapes that could be varicoloured to identify specific cultures, for example. That way, a rectangular flat-roofed structure could be used as a modern apartment block or shed, a Near Eastern building of any period from ancient to modern, an orcish house, a Roman to medieval tower or wall segment, a Mesoamerican building, etc., etc.
Good point. I think a lot of people imagine that there is room for a lot more detail in overland symbols than there really is. The more detail you add the more of a mess the symbol looks when you zoom out. There has to be a balance.
I'll see how it looks when I do it.
I took a break from compasses and scale bars for DD4 to hunt down a very rough untextured test mapped mountain I did back in 2022. Found it, and tried it out.
This is the map file and graphic in Affinity.
And this is what it looks like in CC3.
Obviously, this is just a very basic test, but it's a start.
If you are doing geographical symbols then things we don't have yet like tepui and mangroves would be nice.
Excellent!
I know I'd like a way to easily add contour lines as an option. Say, you'd like to just black and white instead of color and then use contours to define elevations and such. Too much?
Otherwise, it's lookin good!
Cal
Scott - Tepui are a bit tricky top down. They would look very much like an inexplicable slab of stone on the ground unless you looked close enough to see very slight protrusions around the edge. But they could go on a sheet with a shadow, I guess. Just how vertical are the cliffs of a tepui?
Mangroves might be raggy-shaped trees dotted into the edge of the water?
Calibre - That would be good, but it may also be a little too far outside the scope of this style. But it is an idea. We'll see what happens...
A set of symbols to make a castle or two would be fabulous, same with actual churches (as well as other religious buildings)..
EDIT: a more modern style of buildings would be gorgeous too, I'm working on a Isometric Town from the 2019 annual and those are more modern than Mike Schley's SS6 isometric add-on and its lovely to be working with slightly more modern buildings - kind of 1550-1600s.
That would be much better done in a city style, but it's a valuable idea for the future.
If Sue's mountain samples are a judge, I suspect the style may be suitable for large-scale areas primarily, so all fine detail - such as vegetation types and specific kinds of structure - is ruled-out. Points of interest become simply dots, or some other geometric shapes, to show general types, roads and rivers simple lines, and vegetation areas become blocks of (possibly textured?) colours. The mountain style also wouldn't work well with contour lines. This is though making a lot of assumptions from minimal data so far!
Helen's idea of a toolbox of structure parts for top-down settlement views would be extremely helpful for all kinds of buildings and ruins. That is, parts of buildings/ruins that could be combined into new forms every time, rather than them all being pre-drawn.
I've been mapping using Sue's Darklands City style in recent days (albeit, cryptically, not on its own...), and it is amazing what can be done to create top-down structures using just the pieces of thatched roofing materials alone, rather than the prefigured buildings, for instance. Thus the pieces involved needn't necessarily be all that complex for such a toolbox.
Yes, things are a bit minimal at the moment, but you are largely correct. This will be more of a large region scale... I think.
However, the suggestions made do still shape the decisions I have to make about what to try for ;)
I still think the castles idea would be much better done as a city style, where you can see such details as differences between 2 castles. However, since this is a top view style there's no reason you can't combine structure symbols to make mega cities.
At the moment I'm working on the textures. They always come first, no matter what style I'm working on.
This is a prototype grassland fill. The trick is to get it textured enough to look like what it's supposed to be, but not so detailed that it becomes a fizzing mash of dots. It has to be a suggestion of grass, rather than the grass itself.
Remember the test mountain is the size of a mountain.
But now I'm more or less happy with the grass, I think I will do some work on the actual mountain before I get into deserts and swamps and stuff - so you get a better idea of the scale of things.
Calibre - you might be able to use the 3 shades of grassland as contours.
In the meantime I've realised there's no escaping the necessity of doing all the textures first. Only that way can I draw the mountains and hills to fit the colour scheme. So here are 3 desert textures.
I'll put a SYMBOLS HILLS sheet in the style for the foothills that uses a bevel to generate them from hand drawn patches of Solid 20 bitmap. But I may also do regular hill symbols.