Dissolve style maps. [Serif Drawplus]

[ravells]

I've been doodling with Drawplus, which is a low end vector graphics package, came up with this - I'm aiming for that 'dotted' style of drawing which is quite easily achieved by using the dissolve filter. I am sure you can replicate this using any reasonable vector or raster drawing applications.

How I did it:

1. Create the rooms using rectangles and circles and combine them into a single shape (make sure that the fill colour is the same colour as the background and the line colour is black and as thin as you can get it).
2. Feather the shape by 1 pixel (this gets rid of the line)
3. Use an outer glow filter and set colour of the glow to black and the blend to dissolve. You can also use an inner glow depending on how much you want to break up the straight line shape.
4. Play with the opacity, blur and intensity settings until you are happy with the result.

Ravs

[pyrandon]

Wow--I really like that style. I think this is perhaps best seen as a prototype for a type of map, for I can see many exciting avenues which could be pursued for GM & player handout maps alike. Definitely something to play with! Great work.

[RPMiller]

I concur... I haven't ever seen this style before, that I am aware of, but it would make a very cool handout. If you were doing this by hand though it would be quite time consuming. I'm wondering if maybe a more fractal edge to the rooms would be more likely than the even edges that are there now.

[ravells]

I'm sure I've seen this style used before in Call of Cthulhu books which must be where I go the idea from. As I've done it in a vector it takes literally a second to fractalise the rooms, so here is a more fractalised version.

(also one horrible typo 'kind' should have read 'king' corrected.)

What I did was an inner glow and outer glow and used a dissolve filter, should be pretty easy to do in raster programmes too.

Ravs

[RPMiller]

I take it back. I like the first version. The fractalization in the second just doesn't do it for me. Even doing it by hand it would be smoother than that.

[ravells]

Well the fractalisation works by degree, maybe I exaggerated it a bit too much. What about this one?

[RPMiller]

We have a winner! I like it that it isn't perfectly straight, but has a more natural edge to it.

[ravells]

Vector maps rock!