Star Trek RPG campaign maps

[Acidrain]

Thanks. I'm not sure how accurate they are: I pretty much took a scan of a map from the book mentioned in the post before yours and used that as a guide layer to draw on top of...so they're as accurate as that book.
M

Ah, i have the same book and i was wondering and had thought that might have been the case but if i am inquire what did you use in order to create such a fantastic looking map that looks just speechless? I would be interested to knowing how you did it. If you can provide any further information, i would certain welcome it.

Cheers,

A

[mearrin69]

I made the map with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (CS4). I took a scan of the Alpha Quadrant (found online, not scanned myself) and laid that into the background of an Illustrator document. On top of that I made layers containing gridlines, circles for the stars, symbols for outposts and starbases, etc. I brought those into Photoshop layer by layer and applied layer styles to them (mostly a color overlay and a stroke). I created the political regions, nebulae, Badlands, etc. by just painting into layers and applying a style (color overlay, transparancy, inner glow fading to black on the edges, and maybe a gradient) and turning down the opacity. The text is an LCARS font I found on the net somewhere. The paths of ships were made with polygon select and stroke and then deleting out the parts I didn't want. Oh, and there's a starscape I found somewhere on the internet hiding behind the whole thing. I had to move it around and dim out some of the brighter stars so they didn't compete with my actual map stars.

One thing, pointed out above, I found is that a black stroke really made the objects stand out and sort of gave it that LCARS feel - though I was a bit more relaxed about palette than I was on my deckplans.

I think that's everything. Hope it helps!
M

[Acidrain]

Hmmm, interesting i too have that of the Masters Collection of Adobe CS5 which i got a good price from that of work. Ill look into that and see what you have suggested. Thank you

Cheers,

A