A Commission: A set of 7 building and 1 dungeon maps for an RPG

[damonjynx]

Hi Folks,

Been a little busy with life and non-cartography stuff, so haven't been around much lately.

See below images for preliminary work on some of these maps. Thankfully, they are for the most part, not overly detailed. Individual buildings are to be 1/2 Letter page B&W maps, others are to be Letter sized.

The direction brief is simply the authors hand drawn sketches. I was going to do these in Ai, however, at this stage Ps for me is quicker and easier and allows me to do things I haven't yet worked out in Ai. I may hand draw some items and scan and trace them into vectors; furnishings etc. so I can scale them as appropriate.

Prelim work so far has been to setup the documents based on my template, place the jpeg files and begin construction of the walls. This is simply done using the marquee tools and filling with 50% grey. Once I'm happy with the walls, I'll use the magic want tool to select and create a path from the selection and then use separate layers for pattern fills/strokes and so on.

At the moment I'm not adding grids to the images but once I've got to a stage where one is more or less complete and I'm happy with how it looks, I'll shoot it off to the publisher for comments and ask if grids will be required.

As always any feed-back is welcome and appreciated.

### Latest WIP ###

[Larb]

The inn seems a bit overly large (part of the brief? could be lore reasons why it is so hall-like) but apart from that, they look like great initial plans.

[damonjynx]

The inn seems a bit overly large (part of the brief? could be lore reasons why it is so hall-like) but apart from that, they look like great initial plans.

Thanks Larb. I've no idea why the inn is so large. I only get the drawings to work from, not the text.

Anyhow, here is an update. I sent about 6 hours mucking around and finishing the dungeon map. I tried to draw "Dyson-esque" cross hatching, bit it's far too time consuming, so I reverted to my usual method of creating a path of the floor plan and then stroking the path with a scatter brush at various sizes largest-smallest at low opacity.

### Latest WIP ###

[damonjynx]

Hi Folks,

Here are 2 images of one of the other maps/floorplans. One is just my work, the other is my work with the original sketch superimposed.

As usual, any advice or feedback is more than welcome and always appreciated.

### Latest WIP ###



Cheers,

Jim

[damonjynx]

Hi Folks,

I'm after your opinions on what looks best. The dungeon map above or the stippled version below. Bear in mind thee maps are for print/PDF at 1/2 letter size and are meant to be "old-school" in the vein of the White Dwarf maps of the 80's. As you can see I fixed the scale bar...

### Latest WIP ###

[damonjynx]

Hi Folks,

Have completed the maps and sent them for approval/corrections. I also asked that we negotiate a better rate for the more complex/detailed maps as they are quite time consuming, to which the publisher responded favourably.

Below, minus the copyright notice, is what I've submitted.

### Latest WIP ###




Comments, suggestions as usual are always welcome.

Cheers,

[aeshnidae]

I'm digging the floor plans! And I'm glad you went with the original dungeon, not the stippled version.

Have you checked out Alien Skin's Blow-Up? It converts pixels to vectors to enlarge images. It's a PS plug-in; my wife recently tried it out on a composite portrait and it's pretty incredible.

[damonjynx]

Thanks Jen. I stuck with the original because the publisher said they already liked it, so why change it?

I've not heard of that plug-in. Is it free? Do you know if it's compatible with CS4?

[Kimacus]

Hi Folks,

I'm after your opinions on what looks best. The dungeon map above or the stippled version below. Bear in mind thee maps are for print/PDF at 1/2 letter size and are meant to be "old-school" in the vein of the White Dwarf maps of the 80's. As you can see I fixed the scale bar...

### Latest WIP ###

My preference is the stippled version. It's a nice contrast to the hard lines and it fits better with the natural, cavernous surrounds. Also because I too have tried my hand at cross-hatching and while I like the overall look, it's quite time consuming