Pandrea [critics & advice welcome]

[Heinrich Zweihänder]

Hello, I'm working on a map of some role-play universe I'm in.
I've been working on it for a year, and its complexity increase as well.
I already learned a lot working with it, and I hope you'll help me to learn even more as well if you have something to tell.

I'm working with some guy on a CampaignCartographer3 map he did.

map000.png

When I was chosen to help for the map, I decided to use inkscape, for many reasons, but mainly because CampaignCartographer3 do not run on linux... my single operating system.

This should be a quite comprehensive map of the universe, including geography (map elements), countries, religion distribution, main trade resource location, place names, city locations and flag of countries.

Countries :
map004.png

Trade resource : Note location of trade resource is a bit random, just to try it look great. No all resources are done, and some resource need to be modified because there are hardly visible.
Also each trade resource is in its own layer so I can selected the resource I want to display.
map005.png

Now I'm to working on the height map. Using a custom filter based on the diffuse lighting filter node, I convert some grayscale image to a bump. The grayscale image is made of svg shapes, blurred at various level. This is not as easy an creating a grayscale image on some raster image editor, because blurring must occur at the same level along the curve. Besides, for performance reasons, filters have a bounding box to work within. This box is often too small, creating those ugly line/rectangle-bump artifacts in the picture. I truly need to find some better way to create this grayscale image. Also note the rivers were placed long before I start this height map, so I is even harder to create it. The linear river is a canal.

map002.png map001.png

Finally, the elements map. It already gone through some revamp, but is to be again modified. The current version is a bit "cartoonish" and colorful. Each elements were directly drawn on my computer, and cloned with the spray tool of inkscape. Using inkscape allows me to move/delete elements later.

map003.png

I do not really like this map wich looks too much "happy world". I'm now trying to paint my elements by hand, and include them in inkscape. This is long process and I hope the result will stand out.
I'm a bit stuck to decide whether I should outline them with the color of the paper or not. An outline helps to separates elements one from another but it looks a bit strange... I have not decide yet which one is better :
outlined -> map006-a.png map006-b.png <- not outlined
Of course, I painted more than two trees, but I did process only those two for the test.


Well, that was a long post. Thank you for your attention !