Quote:
llamabeast said:
This looks brilliant. How did you make it look like that?
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Hmm, not sure how detailed you want me to get, but I can give the general gist of what I did. First step is to have a graphics program that lets you have a bunch of layers, so you can stack the map elements on top of each other and turn them on/off and adjust the transparency. I use a rather old version of Paint Shop Pro (version 7 I think).
First I copied the original random map into a new layer that sits on top of everything else. That way I can adjust it to around 50% transparency and still see the layers below.
For the water, I copied a section of the Seven Seas map and just pasted it a bunch of times into a "Deep Water" layer. I cleaned up any seams caused by the pasting by hand.
I then made a "Base Ground" layer on top of the water layer and outlined the land areas with a tan color I got from the Seven Seas map. Then filled in the rest of the ground with the same color. I made Base Grass, Base Mountain, Base Waste, and Base Swamp layers the same way using a color for each terrain type from the Seven Seas map. I had three separate layers for the brown land outline and the two different water outline colors.
The Forests are just a section of tress pasted over and over from the Seven Seas map into a Trees layer. The mountains are made up of four different mountains I copied from the Seven Seas map and pasted into a Mountain layer. I covered up where the mountains meet the ground using a hill from the Seven Seas map. I used two layers there. One for foreground hills that would be in front of the mountains and one for background hills that would be behind the mountains. The grass in the swamps and farms are again just repeated patterns from the Seven Seas map, as are the three large buildings on the map. I made the little white "farmhouses" myself. The random map had a kind of giant figure in one of the provinces. I traced it using the brown color and added the lines to make it look like it had smashed into the ground.
The key to making everything blend like it does was to give each of the Grass, Swamp, Waste, and Mountain layers a Gaussian blur. It took me a good hour or so of fiddling around trying different things to figure that part out. Without that each of the grass, swamp, etc. sections would have had a hard border where I outlined them. It would have looked more like a table top map where you use different colored felt to denote different terrain types. You can see in the linked picture where I forgot to erase some of the grass sections that blurred into the rivers.
To make the borders I used a vector line and just drew them on a layer on top of everything else. One important thing is that for some reason the game did not like pure white borders. I had to change the color to a slightly off white tone or the borders would get corrupted and looked kind of crappy. Once they were all drawn I went into a single player game and tested it to make sure the way each province connected to the other made sense. I had to move some mountains and some of the borders so that there were actually open paths from connecting provinces. I think I got all of them.
The whole thing took me a couple of days, but I was experimenting to see what worked and what didn't. If I did another one I think I could do it in at least half the time. One of the reasons this is not as nice looking as the Seven Seas map is I got a little burned out on it and didn't put in as many little details.
Primea
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