Thank you! :)

I really don't think I'm a patch on HW. He hand drew all his symbols, and mine are about 50% modelled in 3D apps like Blender and ngPlant.

I will be moving on to Structures in the next couple of days. Have to keep the pace steady and do what's on the list, or things get unbalanced ;)

Thanks for letting us know, Quenten. I could have done with this about 4 months ago when I was scratching my head over the exact arrangement of houses in the first handful of Spectrum structure symbols. It's not as easy as you think, so I never went to Watabou because of the triangular houses. They would have been no good for what I wanted.

Now, though, this might take days off the workload.

I can download the 3D file and break up the model to rearrange the buildings like setting up for a college still life drawing. You know the sort of thing - 3 hours to draw a carrot, an onion and a chopping board in amazing photographic detail :) (That's what I had to do for my O'level 39 years ago).

I wouldn't say that was mundane!

You're like me, and lots of other people as well. We got on with life and made stuff along the way in those odd moments of time between all the busy stuff :)

Thanks for sharing!

Thank you, Farsight :)

Those are called varicolour symbols, and are generated after the original colour image by the addition of a second png file that denotes the areas that will change colour. If you look through the folders of artwork for the Mike Schley style you will see them. They look like ghost images of the original. These tend to be later additions to a symbol set. The fact that part 1 had varicolour structures was down to Ralf Schemmann generating the necessary files once I handed the set over to him.

I really can't say if there will be time to do more for part 2. That depends a lot on what Ralf has got on his plate in the last fortnight of October ;)

This is to do with extreme altitudes and data that isn't a number - Outliers and NANs.

The instructions on how to ensure your world is free of them are the last 2 paragraphs on page 10 and all of page 11 of the Supplemental Notes.

With hindsight I maybe should have put this in the main Mapping Guide, but at the time I didn't think these things affected unedited synthetic worlds. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!

Oh these are very interesting. Please do keep posting :)

Trees are always tricky things to get right. Their size seems to be a key issue, but whether you like them large or small the size of a tree will ultimately depend on what size you mean to use your map. There is no point in having trees that are too small to be easily identified as trees.

It is basically a good map, though you are missing a scale bar.

The one thing that may need a bit of tweaking is the placement of trees. What is the map telling us? I get the message that this is either dense jungle and covered all over by trees that are represented by the spaced out single trees, or that there are remarkably even copses of trees, each symbolised by a single tree. Since I don't know the scale I can't be sure which of these may be true.

If your area is only partly wooded (for example a forest that has been eaten into by agriculture, or which has large clearings of grassland) it may be communicated more effectively by creating clumps of trees as wooded areas.

Take a look at other maps and the way that other people have shown forest and jungle. If you think a different method might portray your area better, it may be time to reconsider the tree placement.

Ok. I'm not sure I will have time to look at the FCW, where I'm up to my eyeballs in Japanese structures in Sketchup right now, but I'm pretty sure that even with just a few more weeks experience you will probably find it yourself anyway.

As for the scale of the fill - maybe. The thing about fills is that if you scale them up too much they pixelate, so it very much depends on how large you want to print your map. There are two ways of disguising the redundancy (which is what we call it when a seamless tile starts to generate that kind of noticeable pattern). You can either put a lot more in the map so that not enough of the background shows through for the pattern to be visible (you will have some idea of how that works by looking at the area of the settlement). The other way is only necessary if you don't intend to put anything at all in the rest of the grassy area, and involves creating irregular patches of a very similar coloured texture on another sheet above the grass that are themselves not large enough to have the problem, but which cover one in three or four of the more noticeable parts of the pattern where they appear in a line or column without interruption.

It's looking pretty cool, Jim :)

I think you might have an unexpected glow effect, or something similar set on the sheet with the second level of grass on it. That would be what is causing that darker line between the different levels of grass. If you haven't got anything like that I would be interested in seeing what you do have on that sheet.

Its when you get to cackling hysterically at the mess you're in trying to spin a Blender terrain the same way you would a Gaea terrain that you know it's time to take a break.