Errispa

[Mouse]

LOL! Blender isn't the most friendly app. In fact I blame Blender for killing my state of the art monster PC a couple of years ago now. The cooling fan broke in the middle of an 18 hr animation scene while I was asleep one night, and that was the end of that!

Its why I only have a little laptop nowadays - the surviving bit of my original setup

[Mouse]

ChickPea strikes again

Inkscape was the answer for the text. However, I think I need a vice to stick my hand in so it doesn't shake so bad! the smoother bit on the left took nearly an hour of chipping away at the pointy bits and filling in the dips to get it sort of crudely right... ish. The bit on the right is how it looks the first time I draw the shape!

Here is an incredibly rough draft of the intended ribbon/scroll title thingy across the top of the map and the first few successfully deformed words - done in Inkscape.

[ChickPea]

Glad you were able to figure out the text.

How are you making the white banner? Are you painting it in Gimp? Cos (here I go again...) I'd do that in Inkscape too, haha! Don't want to push it on you, but if you want a quick guide, let me know.

[Mouse]

Thanks ChickPea (in fact I can't thank you enough because I was starting to tear my hair out with this banner problem) but I think I will stick to GIMP for now. I've no idea why my hand tremor is playing up so badly right now, but that's a bigger problem for all the drawing I have yet to do on this map than anything else.

As an observation - although I've only been using it for a couple of hours, Sketchup looks a lot like a Corel interface. I was finding things without having to watch the text deformation video I found more than just once. What this means is that since I know Corel so well, providing Sketchup has the same breadth of tools and facilities as the full Corel Suite, its actually a more realistic alternative from my point of view than GIMP is!

There may now be a short break in the proceedings with the Errispa map, since I've also decided that if I want to take part in the Map a Battleship challenge I need to start that pretty soon.

[Abu Lafia]

Wow, this came together quickly! Very appealing work so far. I love the overall palette and the windrose looks absolutely fantastic!

[Mouse]

Aw thanks Abu

Wouldn't have got this far without everyone diving in to help me every time I get a bit stuck - thank you all!

Speed is the natural trademark of doing a CC3 map - not that you would think this having witnessed me take 4 months to do Merelan City! LOL! This one is more of a multimedia map though. The main map where all the various bits and bobs are being collated and put together is a CC3 map, but I got the coastline and the rotating globe from Fractal Terrains 3, the relief shading was done in Wilbur, and I've used GIMP, Sketchup and the odd 5 minute burst of CorelDraw and Corel Photopaint (since I can't get away from the fact that its the only graphics package I really do know inside out, even if it crashes all the time on me now).

The wind rose is drawn entirely in CC3, which in my opinion has no equal for precision geometric work (probably because its a FastCAD app). The shapes only took me 5 minutes to draw and arrange. It was the thinking about the design and working out how to position everything that took the time - some of the angles involved are correct up to 3 decimal places

With all these slightly different graphics apps in play I occasionally forget which one I am in and get a bit confused as to the exact method how to do something, but I guess that's what you get if you try learning 3 or 4 new apps all at the same time.

[Mouse]

Please ignore the lack of progress on the ribbon!

I've changed the font out for one that Daniel pointed me to, and I think it looks a lot better - even though there are no printing presses on Ethran (where the map was created and pasted on the inside of the front cover of the Great Book of Errispa by Domar (full name Domarik Kinson).

I wanted to know what you thought of the new font. Like I said - please ignore the scrappy state of the ribbon, text included. I haven't worked on that just yet

[Mouse]

Couldn't leave it alone...

At this rate I'm not going to have time to do the Challenge!

Still not perfect, but the ribbon thing looks a lot more like I wanted it to look. Though it would have been possible to do the text exactly the same in Inkscape, I gave up the learning curve and did it in CorelDraw - crashing and all.

[Mouse]

This may not be to everyone's taste, but it is only an experiment

[kacey]

It's looking really nice Mouse, I like the shading you've done inside the banners, but I think it would top the cake if you could somehow deform the text to go with it, and maybe rough it up a bit. The text is nice, and I like the font, I just feel it needs to be grounded into the folds, and shading a bit, right now it seems to be floating on top, if that makes any sense. Overall the map looks awesome, I really like where you're going with this.