Hi Everyone :)

This is a WIP thread showing the completion of a map that was started a while back by Jerry Thiel. Jerry has done a vast amount of work for the Community Atlas, but sadly owing to Motor Neurone Disease is no longer able to map. I offered to finish a map of his choice for him, and Jerry sent me the FCW for a map based on the Michigan area south of the Great Lakes where he grew up. I also asked if Jerry wanted this to be a private thing, or if he wished me to do a WIP thread. Jerry chose the WIP thread option, so here we go...

The map (which I have temporarily named "Jerry's Map") is based on the Michigan area around the Great Lakes of North America.

This is what Jerry had to say about the continuation of his map:

"Use any style you want. I was planning on a fantasy world. The big village would have been called "City of the Grand Traverse." The early French explorers called the passage across the large bay from the peninsula tip east, the Grand Traverse, as it shortened their canoe voyage significantly. 

The two villages facing each other on the Upper and Lower Peninsulas I pictured as the capitols of two antagonistic city-states.

The narrow peninsula running north from GT Is called Old Mission Peninsula after a small mission church built to service the local Indian reservation. The northern tip of the on the 45 latitude and there is an Indian legend that warriors would gather there on the summer solstice to shoot at the sun to cause it to turn back to the south so that it couldn't escape to leave the world in eternal darkness."

Jerry - please feel free to comment and guide as we go. It is, after all, your map I'm working on :)

If you mean like this

That's just a matter of which snap point you pick to start your grid. If you get the wrong one just hit ESC and try again.

Don't forget that you don't have to have your grids perfectly matched with the edges of the map, because the overlap will be hidden by the screen and frame of the map. It is highly unlikely that your map will be exactly and perfectly a whole number of hexes in either direction, but that is perfectly normal. If you are really intent on trying to align the whole grid system on the map, try for just one of the corners (which equates to 2 adjacent sides). More than that is a bit extreme.

Ok!

To make the paper really worth it, the texture had to be very large, so I compensated for the strain on the cache by doing away with all bar 4 of the original textures and making the terrain plain colour polys that are multiplied onto the paper background so they look like they have been painted onto it.

I think I've got the colours fairly similar.

Ok. I've tried all kinds of different colour variations and they all look just as weird as the pink tint.

So I decided to totally flatten the patterns in the textures (except the forests) and impose a paper texture on all of them. Maybe this looks more 'grim' without looking bad?

Something like this, then?