How Do You Draw Small Vehicles?
Marja Erwin
Traveler
Hi,
I've seen sample drawing of smaller vehicles, to add to city and battle maps, but I don't know how to draw them. The *Tome of Ultimate Mapping* suggests using Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Cosmographer and the 2021 Annual include options for deck plans for ships and other larger vehicles.
I have visual and coordination problems, and haven't been able to use Gnu Image Manipulation Program or Inkscape. I struggle with freehand drawing in general, and want either low-resolution pixel drawing or a low-resolution snap grid.
Since CC3+ already has a snap grid, and it already is Cad, I wonder if it would work for drawing smaller vehicles.
If not, then I wonder what other drawing software might work on Windows.
P.S. I also tried Paint, but I don't want to deal with Copilot, and I want to be able to set a clear scale, like about 4 pixels per foot, or about 13 pixels per meter, depending; the way it automatically resizes its grids gets in the way.
Comments
If you have some kind of reference material - an image that is similar to what you want, you can import that image into CC3 and create a vector drawing of it by hand - making use of any grid you like.
But maybe I'm not getting the point?
This depends heavily on exactly how detailed or abstract you need the drawings to be. I drew a number of basic top-down vehicle illustrations from the 1920s-1930s for tabletop wargame use back in 2012 using MS Publisher, for instance, with only black lines and coloured polygons, such as this example of a 1920 pattern Rolls-Royce Armoured Car:
Not the best of images, as I've had to extract this from a larger old GIF image today, because the originals are on a different computer, but you get the idea. The road-look background is a bitmap fill from CC3 (as it was back then).
It would be very easy to draw the same thing entirely in CC3+ today, using those same basic shapes and lines alone.
As Sue noted, reference images are key. I used photos, drawings and plans of real-world examples for my earlier project (I did a number of armoured vehicles, military aircraft and civilian vehicles too), including of models when I couldn't find clear enough period photos. I imported those into Publisher, and then traced the lines and polygons to achieve the result you can see.
The process was very time-consuming in Publisher. It would be less-so with CC3+ now, because it will do a lot of things Publisher wouldn't, such as mirroring a previously drawn line, or drawing it to the exact angle needed.
If you have Symbol Set 3: Modern, the vector style there contains several vehicles drawn using CC3+. And you can explode the symbols to get a good look at how they are constructed.
As a non-artist, drawing vectors in CC3+ would be my way to go, as I am hopeless with those image editors, and prefer the precision I get with snapping and coordinate/angle inputs.
In GIMP, you can configure the grid, then show grid, then snap to grid. When you draw, it will snap along those options. If you want to preserve a straight line, you click on a dot, then hold down the shift key and it will be a straight line. You can also zoom in. Thus, you could sit things to be a low DPI, have a small area, and then zoom into things in a small area. The grid will also help.
Thanks. I'm not worried about fine detail, so I think I could start with a grid, and a rectangle of the right dimensions, and then try to eyeball within that rectangle. Would City Designer be the right starting-point, or Cosmographer, or something else?
You can draw a new vector symbol in any drawing. It's probably going to be easier if you draw it in the map you want to use it in.