Loopysue
Loopysue
About
- Username
- Loopysue
- Joined
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- Member, ProFantasy
- Points
- 10,110
- Birthday
- June 29, 1966
- Location
- Dorset, England, UK
- Real Name
- Sue Daniel (aka 'Mouse')
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- Cartographer
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- 27
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Birdseye Continental - style development thread
My experience of volcanoes is limited to recent Icelandic and Hawaiian erruptions - the last 4 years of them anyway, so the fill reflects at least the mood of what I've seen of the relatively flat ground around those eruptions, which seems to be surprisingly pale except where vehicles off road and turn the surface to reveal the darker colours, but I'll keep it for something else and try a volcanic-coloured version of the tundra fills.
Another reason for making it relatively pale is that the darker the fill is, the darker the symbols have to be, and the darker the symbols are, the less effective the map files are, to the point where you can hardly see any shading at all. Map files work best on mid-tone symbols like rooftops. We'll be ok with the regular mountains because they aren't as dark as volcanoes, but the volcanoes are certainly proving to be quite a challenge.
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Birdseye Continental - style development thread
Wyvern - I was just thinking about the ridges. I put the mountain shape on the hill shape sheet instead, which has a much softer blur.
There will be a range of volcanoes to play with - most of them smaller than these. These are supervolcano size.
Calibre - That's a shame. I wouldn't change it too much - the volcano symbols won't match. But on the bright side, these are mapped symbols, so as long as you have them on a sheet of their own you can use colour changing sheet effects on them too.
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Birdseye Continental - style development thread
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Can't Export this to JPEG
:)
- Type SIMPLIFY and hit Return
- Look at the command line
- If it's some other figure hit the zero and Return.
- Hit return if you haven't already
- And then select the path or straight polygon you want to simplify. The action will be immediate.
Oh look at that! I bet Wyvern has beaten me to it while I was trying to work out how to make the paragraph numbering go right.
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IDEA: Terrain over cutout rivers
Another alternative I've used in the past is to have the land as the background with all the terrain on top of that, and then add the water - a bit like a city map, but overland. I call it "sea over land". I think Darklands Overland is done that way. Birdseye Continental is definitely done that way. Oceans and rivers are drawn on the same sheet. A Color Key is used to cut island continents out of a rectangular map-covering ocean, and regular non-Color Key rivers drawn on top of the land and terrain on the same sheet.
However, when you are revisiting an oder style it's best not to make major changes when the older style was originally what I call "land over sea". It's too confusing for new mappers.



