"Hand Drawn" style maps...

[Irishmafia2020]

Just a quick question, how do you get the hand drawn style maps?
By that I mean, the style of the map that is in the tutorial, and which I have seen forum screen shots of otherwise. The maps I play on are typical randomly generated maps, but none of them have the "hand drawn" style of the tutorial... Is there an option to generate such maps?

[Gandalf Parker]

Nothing I know will "generate" such maps. Usually they are either drawn by an artist type, or found as images. Then you would add the boundaries and neighbor settings and terrains. Some people have used satellite photos, or "pirate map" drawings. But you could use any image. Even an image of some movie star if you wanted to.

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmmmm but now that I think about it, if you took a generated map into a paint program and dropped the colors way down, then added a "sepia" or an "antiquing" special effect... then I guess it would come pretty close.

[Endoperez]

You'd have to copy the white pixels into another layer before adding the filters. Every pure white pixel (0,0,0) is a province center, and leaving any out will cause problems with the province numbering, and then the terrains will go awry and seas will be lands and mountains will be swamps etc etc.

[Tifone]

I would have really loved hand-drawn style random generated maps too. Not that I don't like the current ones. But the option would have been cool :)

[Sombre]

Hmmmmm but now that I think about it, if you took a generated map into a paint program and dropped the colors way down, then added a "sepia" or an "antiquing" special effect... then I guess it would come pretty close.

I don't think the result would actually look anything like the 'hand drawn' maps the game ships with. It would just look like a sepia version of whatever image you used.

[Tifone]

Someone tries and posts the result? :)

[Ballbarian]

You might find this thread (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=37593) interesting. Coinspinner_72 goes into some depth describing how he created the Primea map.

[Gandalf Parker]

Good find BB.
That one isnt bad. But if the map was dropped down to almost a 2-color image (black and white) then sepia'd Im thinking the result would look more like a pencil drawing.

There are also tools on many paint programs to try and do the same thing. Posterizing might help also (kills the details in order to make big solid-colored areas)

Something else people might look at is the old Dom2 3rd party map-generator called DomMap. You can set it for the colors you want. And either speckled or solid-colored provinces. The result is considered ugly now but since it creates a fairly useful map without added images then it would work to create a blank template to find and add your own images to.
http://www.dom3minions.com/~dominion/Dominions2/RandomMaps/RandomMaps.html
or even the stripped down "blanks" that Targa used to start with for his maps (also made with DomMap).
http://www.dom3minions.com/~targa/blanks/
You might also look at Harbringers new mapgen which can create template maps that are wrappable. Like these..
http://www.dom3minions.com/RandomMaps/Small_Wrapped/Small_Wrapped.htm
Add in some graphics from other programs and it can be a unique and very playable map

[lch]

I'm not so sure about what you mean, but if you mean that the texture of the map looks like it was painted on a canvas, then there are effects for that, for example Filters > Artistic > Apply Canvas in the GIMP, which gives this effect:

7171 to 7172

If you use the GIMPressionist filter in the same category you have a bunch of options more. But maybe I installed that filter separately and it doesn't ship by default.

[Zeldor]

You can get FX-Foundry for GIMP. Sepoina Graf-ix from Artistic menu has nice effect [but you'd probably want to mix it a bit].

Sepoina Graf-ix

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/silentseasw.jpg

Sepoina Graf-ix + Oil Paint

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/silentseasw2.jpg

Sepoina Graf-ix + Oil Paint + Split Tone

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/silentseasw3.jpg

[lch]

Sepoina Graf-ix + Oil Paint
That's nothing more than a bevel filter effect.

[Gandalf Parker]

Are those images the results against an already hand-drawn map?
Id rather see the results against a generated map. Maybe lowering the colors way down, or taking it to greyscale, and then running those filters against it.

[Edratman]

Are those images the results against an already hand-drawn map?
Id rather see the results against a generated map. Maybe lowering the colors way down, or taking it to greyscale, and then running those filters against it.

I recognize that map. It is "Silent Seas", one of the maps that comes with the game.

[Lingchih]

Yes, it is Silent Seas. But a few of those look better than the Silent Seas that ships with the game.

[Endoperez]

Yes, it is Silent Seas. But a few of those look better than the Silent Seas that ships with the game.

I'm not sure about better, but I think I'd rather play some of those maps than the same old Silent Seas. I've played it quite a lot.

[Zeldor]

Yeah, all are modified Silent Seas, I just wanted to show it based on the very popular [mostly for tests and duels] maps. You can surely get better effects, I just played 5 minutes with random options - you can do that with every random map to give it more unique feel.

[Edratman]

Zeldor,

Could you do one of the game randomly generated maps? They are not as attractive as Silent Seas and would present another perspective to these tools.

[Zeldor]

I must admit that effects on redoing Silent Seas look better :)

But I think that even for random maps redone versions are much nicer:

Different settings of Sepoina:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/testmap1.jpg


Added Split Tone:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/testmap2.jpg

Some extreme example:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/testmap3.jpg


But yeah, I guess you need to spend some time and look for good options that will work well with random maps [and it may be a better idea to use that scripts against maps made in other editors, for example homm].

[Stavis_L]

Well, if you want "hand drawn look" without hand drawing skill...

AFAIK, the "gold standard" in fantasy maps is ProFantasy's set of tools.

See their example gallery here:
http://www.profantasy.com/evidence/gallery.asp

You can get anything from the kind of maps that they use in Dungeon mag to the kind that are in the Lord of the Rings books. However, it's not free (by a long shot, depending on how many of their tools you want), and it's based on CAD software, so there is a bit of a learning curve. I played around with it a bit when I was doing a lot of PnP RPG mapping, but eventually decided that it was easier to just search for things on the internet :)

However, it does do pretty "hand drawn" style maps.

There's also a product from NBOS software:
http://nbos.com/products/mapper/mapper.htm

...that lets you put vector graphics down on top of fractal based maps, and some of it looks quite similar to the Silent Seas map. Again, not free.

Then, there is the free option, AutoREALM, also inspired by CAD software. Not as nice and not as full featured, but it may float your boat. Here's an example from their SourceForge page where someone created some "Lord of the Ring-esque" style maps (and other things as well.):
http://autorealm.sourceforge.net/mapsROY.php

It'd be great to have some other map style options roll out of the auto-generator, but I'm guessing that the coloration options that Semi-Random and such gives (or at least makes accessible) are about as good as it's going to get.

[Gandalf Parker]

I rather like the SplitTone example. Thats closer to what I had imagined. It does seem to show that with some work you can take a generated map to looking almost like a hand-drawn one.