Study of battlemaps

[tilt]

lovely colors, if I should give some advice/critique it would be that I have a difficult time seeing what is what. Are the bright green spots trees? if so, are the other bushes? They all seem the same height and coarseness. The path is much to coarse as well - if its just a bit travelled -which it looks like cause no green on it, then it would be trampled.

[SrgDark]

You should! I do like advice and critiques.

They're all supposed to be trees of various sizes, but like you said, they seem like bushes when you give the map a casual glance. I tried putting down directional shadows to indicate that they're trees, but that needs more work too. The lack of sense of scale doesn't help the matter. Once you put down a grid, it becomes much more apparent that these aren't some tiny things. Here is the same map with a grid slapped on.



One square is 5 feet. With the grid, scale's easier to tell, but I leave them off for roll20. It has its own grid that is automatically set, after all. Y'think that sharpening them would give a clearer idea of what they are? Will likey try to make a top down cut of a trunk. With proper settings, it'll be slightly visible though the canopy, giving a much better idea of what is what.

[tilt]

ah.. much bigger scale than I thought .. but yes, its hard to show all those trees without showing where the trunks are

[wdmartin]

Re: grids. This one is much too heavy. It distracts from the content of the map. Make it lighter. Also, you can increase the sense of vertical depth if some of the objects in your map are "above" the grid. Example:



In this, you can see where the grid lies, but it doesn't obscure the details. Also, the grid runs "underneath" the tree, which preserves the illusion that the grid is "on the ground" not hovering somewhere up in the air.

To make this grid, I rendered out a bunch of white lines. Each square is 100x100 px, and each line was 2 px of solid white. I added it as its own layer, and then blurred the layer -- 2px Gaussian blur. Then I changed the layer blending mode to "Overlay", and adjusted the opacity of the layer to taste (75% in this case).

You're always going to have people asking for both gridded and gridless versions. It's just a good idea to produce both. They can be made at the same time with only minimal effort, and then people don't have to ask.

As for supporting printing, if you design at a resolution of 100 pixels to the five-foot square, that is effectively the same as designing at 100 DPI, and they should print out fine at that resolution. The printed squares will wind up 1 inch across. If you're making an unusually large map, you might need to reduce that to 50px. If your map is so large that the finished JPG is over 10 MB, you're likely to hit performance problems with VTTs like Roll20 or Maptool.

[SrgDark]

That's some nice insight mate! Real helpful. Something I'll keep in mind for the future. As far as the one up there is concerned, it was quickly slapped on to show the scale properly.

To celebrate my gathering together some of the maps I've worked on lately into my second Map Pack, here's a better done grid for the map you reffered to, where followed your advice. Grid's done by roll20 rules tho', being 70x70. One square represents five feet. Looks nicer, don't it?

A question though. If I wanted to make it print friendly, I just upscale it from 72 to 100 pixels/in and then add the grid in? Shouldn't be issues, right?

[wdmartin]

It does look much better, yes!

As for prepping for print, I'd go the other way. Design at 100, then shrink to 72 for roll20. The reason being that scaling things up necessarily involves a loss of quality in a raster graphic. Here's an example (click the thumbnail for full size):



In this, I designed the left swatch at 72 pixels to the 5-foot square, and set the DPI at 72. Then I upscaled it to 100 pixels to the 5-foot square, and 100 DPI. It's not a huge difference, but if you look closely you'll notice that the upscaled side is a bit blurrier than the left image. That's because when you're increasing a raster image in size, there are going to be gaps: places in the new image for which there are no pixels in the original image. When that happens, the scaling algorithm has to fill in the gaps by "guessing" what pixels ought to be there. Generally, that means it starts at the edges of the gaps and takes an average of the color values in adjacent pixels until it's filled in the empty spot.

The results tend to look "fuzzy". It's more noticeable the greater the shift in size; going from, say, 11 pixels to 100 pixels gives you a waaaaay blurrier image. Going from 72 to 100 is not so dramatic a change, but it's definitely present.

Compare with this swatch (click the thumbnail for full size):



In this one, I designed the original (on the left) at 100 pixels to the 5-foot square, and 100 DPI. Then I downscaled it do 72 pixels to the 5-foot square, and 72 DPI. If you compare closely, there is some loss of detail, but the image still appears sharp. That's because when going from large to small, the algorithm winds up removing pixels rather than interpolating them. It's easier for the resizing algorithm to figure out which pixels to get rid of, so it winds up preserving the ones that are most important to the clarity of the image.

[Josiah VE]

Great work here SrgDark. Your second map pack after like starting three months ago! Have some rep!

[SrgDark]

I see wdmartin, that does make sense. Thanks for the explanations

An' thanks Josiah. I've had some time on my hands. With the way college is going into exam period, I'm thinking I might not have as much soon enough.

[SrgDark]

Hey guys, I hope y'all are having a blast making maps. I'm busy with college, so it's still hard for me. Still, I managed to whip this up as a practice piece. It's suppose to be a rice field, but I don't think I've gotten the field just right. Still, I figured I'd post something, just to show I'm still amongst the living. Rock on dudes!

[SrgDark]

Finally, the college workload is getting lighter. Decided I'd start working on my next map pack about now. This one'll be a temple dungeon, with the entrance, first and second floors, as well as the catacombs that extend below, perhaps towards some nasty secret hidden away. We'll see. To that end, here's the entrance, which is still a bit of a WIP. Needs that foliage now, as well as cracks upon the floor. The shadow of the roof these pillars are supporting I'm not too happy with either, so that'll probably get reworked.

I've included a bit of flavor text too, since I like to flesh the maps out.

Temple of Avir Tel has been abandoned ever since the Dairine, the goddess of fertility and nature, took it upon herself to interfere with mortal affairs. As her punishment, god of war Cruor broke her mortal vessel and burned it along with every major temple she had on the continent. Avir Tel was one such temple. Ever since the fire, it lay abandoned, with nature slowly taking it over while good people of nearby village Longdong did nothing to interfere with the process, believing the place to be cursed. Which might as well be true, given the nature of its new inhabitants...