Thursday, March 26, 2009

Continued Distraction

Obviously, still distracted. I have finally, finally finished the first map for Underland. As I said before, I can't post the whole thing because I have player's going through it, but I break down now and post just a snippet so the old-schooliness of the thing can be seen.




7 comments:

  1. How do you make these maps?

    I ask because I have a number of hand-drawn maps for a current project which I would love to do up in TSR Blue. But I can't find any sort of tutorial explaining the process for, well, any software.

    I presume that a vector-based drawing program, an alpha fill, and multiple layers (grid/key/walls, at least) are requisites. But a short tutorial would be most helpful.

    Adam

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  2. My first comment! Huzzah!

    Hi Adam.

    There is probably a cleverer way to do them than I do (I suspect that Joe Bardales did the Mad Archmage maps seen at http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2009/03/castle-of-mad-archmage-poster-maps.html smarter than I did).

    But, I did indeed do what you suggest. I started with a hand-drawn map and scanned it. Then I placed it into Adobe Illustrator and used the auto-trace feature. That was the easy part. It took me forever to find the right shade of blue to colour that lines. For the record, in CMYK I used C 87.06%, M 23.53%, Y 8.63%, and K 1.53%.

    Once that was done, I spent a good while fiddling with the lines and filling in the background. Then I drew in the symbols and numbers using Soutane Bold font, which nicely matches the old TSR modules.

    At the end, I realized that my graph paper that I had downloaded looked awful, because the map. So I just drew up a new one, which was boring and time-consuming, but the effect is much better.

    If you have Illustrator, I'd be happy to give any more specific tips. I was actually playing the idea of posting some kind of tutorial, if there was enough interest in it.

    I learned quite a lot doing it and I think that the next one will be much faster than this first one.

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  3. I do have access to Illustrator, but I don't know how to use it very well. I would love to see a tutorial. Hopefully it's more than just me that's interested.

    Adam

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  4. I'll see what I can do. Maybe I'll do a step-by-step on the blog as I do Map 2.

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  5. Matthew,

    Nice map, I look forward to seeing more — I do my own maps much the same way. A tip: if you take advantage of Move (to copy) plus Duplicate (command-D) you can do up a graph of any custom size that you want in a matter of minutes. Start with a square the size you want, Move (to copy) horizontal the width of the square. Hit command-D and this will duplicate the square as many times as you need. Then select all of your squares and do the same thing vertically with the whole row. Graph complete.

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  6. That's clever. Did you draw the hills and mountains on your Erimia map free-hand and trace them, or did you draw them in with the Pencil or Paintbrush?

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  7. I drew them freehand, scanned them, and then made them vector. That way they can be easily tweeked, resized, and duplicated.

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