Êrnitom - The Infinite Planet

[Baile nam Fonn]

|| UPDATE: comments, advice, encouragement welcome! I'm new to mapping and this is my first public map project.
||
|| Descending into madness: the attached export map & trace pleased me initially, but now I want better resolution!
|| To achieve this, I'm using 1 x 1 embarks / embark anywhere and exporting local images. It will be a bunch of sea-bed elevation stuff at first.
|| I will then parse the data from these images onto a grid in Inkscape and tweak the resultant paths by hand.
|| This is going to take a while.
|| But I plan to break it up by Region tiles, updating this post with crudely labelled, black & white images (of the Inkscape stuff, I will spare y'all from ASCII ) as I complete each tile.
|| May the power of Epic Music Vn give give me strength.
||
|| I've nicknamed the place Ernie'sTome (alternatively Ernie'sTomb, if my mood darkens).
||
||
|| Belated thanks to ChickPea for the comment.



My plan is to try making a hybrid conventional top down + typographic map using the generated language place names.
Here's an example of the style which is a big part of my inspiration. If mine manages to turn out even fractionally as good as James McDonald's artwork, I'll be thrilled!

My powergoals are all about labelling.
After I get an attractive map in place, next up is a series of themed variations which
will showcase the incredible density of a Dwarf Fortress world ..even a small and short-lived one.

Below, I proudly present the results of the Inkscape-trace of a Legends export detail map (buildings and roads). Patching up the trace to fill in colours was tedious, but I love those bold strokes!
No labels or legend yet, so I'll point out a few things:

• The palette is default from the DF export. It really needs to change.
• Up is north.
• I added the subtle 33 x 33 grid, which divides the map into 1089 Region tiles (each one measuring 1.54 km x 1.54 km). These correspond to the coordinate system which the Legends viewer uses.
• Bright Green are Hill Dwarf settlements (fortresses are not shown yet, but there are three in the mountains)
• Dark Green are Forest retreats, some of which have an eyebrow-raisingly high Grizzly-to-Elf population ratio.
• On the east and south coast are the colourful Human centres. Yeah, I still have some work to do on those.
• The black squares house Goblins. They do a trench-maze thing as part of their Dark Pits / Fortresses, and apparently that accounts for the shape.
• Two of the Western ones are in ruins (one was squashed by a Titan), denoting that is on the long to-do list.
• The larger island in the south boasts a Wicked Man and a Bleak Horror. And a cave called Rirngethac Noguithra, which is home to four hundred fifty-six cave swallows and a family of five giant moles. Sweet.

Thanks to vectors, I'll eventually be able to scale it up with ease once I dump the source image entirely. Yay!

[Baile nam Fonn]

I found another inspiring example of typographic mapping: http://www.axismaps.com/blog/2014/11...pographic-map/

Very cool! You can see how the 'Wavy water text' also serves as a texture for the map.
This is close to what I want to achieve with mine, except more muted or blended with the terrain, so that the viewer can clearly read the translated labels which I'll try to place in accordance with ordinary map labelling conventions.

Now I haven't even begun to apply these inspirations, but I'm certainly psyched about this project and enjoying myself so far.

[ChickPea]

That's a cool map and a really interesting effect with the text. I'm keen to see how you implement it.

[Baile nam Fonn]

Some more gratuitous fun with Inkscape tracing.
This is the rainfall map for the world, which I traced, colourized and subjected to the Wrinkled Varnish filter.

Light = more rain, Dark = less.

(Gosh, I love that filter, though!)

Hopefully less tomfoolery and more collection of necessary data from the embark screen today.