Continuing our series of interviews with cartographers, this month we're talking to Anna B. Meyer. She's known for her 3d map work. We asked her 7 questions, as we will in each interview.
1) Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background...
I'm a long time gamer who grew up in Sweden and started to play D&D back in the early 80's. Played all sorts of RPG's and board games over the years but my favorite is still fantasy RPG's. Gaming has been a big hobby and on and at times work for me, been running a game store for some years, managed conventions etc, but creating maps have always been my biggest passion. Moved to Southern California five years ago, got married and now live between Los Angeles and San Diego.
2) How did you get into mapping? and
3) Do you create maps professionally, or for fun? If you've sold your work, how did you get started? Any fun/horror stories to share about commissioned work?
Maps have always fascinated me and learned to find my way using maps and a compass when I was a young kid, and when I started gaming, maps quickly became my focus. At first, my maps was simple pencils sketches on paper trying to detail my Greyhawk campaign. In the 90's computers became capable of running graphical programs and I was hooked, ran off and bought the most powerful computer available.
For a long time, I just worked on maps for my own games, but when the Internet came around and I created a website and uploaded things began to change. My maps quickly attracted attention in the Greyhawk community, and they were among the first ones to make use of 3D landscaping software. For a decade, I made slow progress working on my Flanaess map in my spare time running into all sorts of limitations, mostly time and computer limitations. When I moved to California I decided to focus on map creation trying to turn it into something more than a hobby. So I spent three years finishing my map of the Flanaess and got an ENnie nomination 2014 for it.
Now five years later I'm certainly working full time with it, and earning a bit of money. In order to not let anyone think that this is an easy career, I'm not working for the money. For me it is a work of love and passion, the money is a necessary thing to invest in tools and help pay bills. But it gives me the joy of spending a lot of time working on RPG cartography and other types of maps as well.
Working on commission means you have to try and create something for a specification made by others. To be prepared for criticism is not only necessary for me, it is a vital part of how I work. One of the most difficult aspects of most projects I've been working on is to find the information needed to do a good job. For maps of a real place you have satellite images, survey data etc, but for an imaginary place you have to read about it in fragments, look at maps already made and such. This is difficult and tedious at best and downright impossible at the time. People you work with tend to be less visible than you are, which is one of the main reasons they want you to make a map for you in the first place. So when you ask them for what details should be on the map you often only get vague answers. When they have something to look at you usually get all the information you wanted, but often delivered in the form of harsh criticism. So I've learned to be quick to hand over sketches I know are incomplete just to get the criticism going, that way I'm turning my worst critics into a useful quality control.
The best thing for me are all the great friends from all over the world my maps have given me. To get a chance to meet some of them at conventions are great fun and make up for all the lonely days at the desk trying to figure out how to make it look the way you want it. Even the best of jobs have its downsides, and being a freelance cartographer certainly has its ups and downs. Working at Gen Con and hanging out with gamers and professionals are the best, trying to solve problems bugging you without having colleagues around are among the worst. Right now I'm having a mini crisis since one of the computer programs I'm using is no longer updated and supported, so I have to get an alternative. The extra cost is bad, but the time and effort to try and get up to speed using it is a hassle which will set me back a few months.
4) What kind of computer setup/equipment/software do you have? Any advice or tips for learners?
Most of my work are done using a combination of 3D and 2D computer graphics. For that, a whole range of tools is needed, from 3D editors, 3D landscape software, image editors etc. The tools I use are World Machine, Terragen, Vue, Blender, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and Illustrator
mostly).
In order to run all this in an effective manner, I have three desktop computers. The main desktop that I have my three 30 inch monitors, mouse keyboard, and a Wacom digitizer hooked up to. This computer also has Adobe Creative suite and a bunch of other minor tools for texture creation and such as well. It is a Quadcore i7 with 64GB of RAM, a fast SSD and dual Nvidia Titan GPU's, and a raid array for short term storage. When you work large images you can never have enough storage. I continuously save files under new names during a project so I can revert back if I realize I'm heading in the wrong direction, sometimes that means I create hundreds of GB of data per day. The reason I have so much GPU power has more to do with my gaming habits, but still comes in handy in Photoshop and Illustrator.
My second desktop is primarily a 3D workhorse with a 8 Core CPU, 128GB of RAM, Nvidia Quadro professional GPU and an SSD Raid array for fast swapping for the large renders. This machine runs Terragen, Vue, World Machine and Blender, and bu having them on a separate machine I can continue to work on my main machine even during long renders. If need be I can fire up the same programs on my main machine while the 3D machine works in the background.
My third machine is my old (four years old) desktop with a DualCore CPU and 16GB RAM, but it has 12TB of hard drives for long term storage. This machine I also use for uploads, and downloads which can take ages for large files. I'm also running virtual Linux on it for some testing and as a render cow. I use a software KVM tool that let me control them seamlessly on any of my big screens and using the same mouse and keyboard. I've dreamed of a setup like this for years and now I have it. For me a fast and well set up computer it's not only fun to work with, it helps me stay focused minimizing irritating interruptions.
This is expensive and you can easily run all this on any decent computer you buy today, the reason I got it is to be able to work faster to try and meet deadlines and demands for results. Some of the software I'm using costs $500 to $1000 dollars for the professional versions. Thankfully most of them have cheaper and often even free basic versions you can start out learning on, so the initial cost can be low. If you already have a computer you can download the free versions and start creating right away!
5) What are your favourite kind of maps or favourite map makers from history?
My first map making hero must be Darlene that did the original Greyhawk map which was a huge inspiration for me. In the field today, there is a number of fantastic cartographers. Two of my absolute favorites are Jonathan Roberts and Alyssa Faden whose work I look up to and see as good as it gets. Jonathan's highly artistic landscapes and Alyssa's cities set new heights for me to strive for.
My range of inspiration goes from old medieval maps to satellite and landscape imagery. The hardest thing for me is to try and strike a balance between aesthetics and functionality, to inspire and inform. A map designed to be used as a gaming aid need to fall somewhere on this continuum, some maps are mostly made to inspire new adventures and move the story along. Others are more of simple aid to present information in an effective manner.
6) What do you consider your best piece of work? How about your favourite, if different?
My biggest professional achievement so far is the map I did for the Southlands for Kobold Press which I'm very proud of. It was a lot of work that took me the better part of a year with many reworks and even a restart several months into the project.
My favorite work is still my Flanaess map, it was done as a work of love without the intention of being a commercial project so I didn't have any of the constraints, like time, physical format etc that a publishable project needs. The result became a map that is too big to print and way more details that are possible to overview.
7) Where can we find you on the web?
My website, ghmaps.net, is probably the easiest.