Raoul Village

[Mouse]

This is just a bit of light-hearted fun I was having this afternoon. That's why there's no WIP thread.

I couldn't continue with a big map I was working on in GIMP and feeling a bit down about it, so I started playing around with a list of classical wolf names a bit of parchment texture and a few houses, and came up with this:

Raoul Village.jpg

Software: Campaign Cartographer 3+

Parchment: My own made in GIMP
Houses: CC3+ Bitmap A
Compass: Herwin Wielink style compass from CC3+
Trees: My own made in Blender
Bridges: Symbols from Bogie's Mapping Objects used in conjunction with CC3+
Table texture: My own made in Genetica

[- JO -]

Nothing like a cool little village to make you love mapping again !!!!
Just plain and simple, and yet beautiful ! Nice work on this tool you totally masterize, Mouse !!!!

I hope you get GIMP and WACOM to talk each other soon !!!

[Mouse]

LOL! Thank you Jo.

Like I said this was just pootling around with stuff really. I haven't done a big CC3 map for ages. Maybe its time?

I still can't get GIMP to open (it got worse and started failing in the middle of the startup routine), and I haven't bothered with the tablet, since CC3 isn't really a tablet orientated app

I'll think about it tomorrow maybe.

[mat_r]

I like it! Simple, effective and the organization of the page is really pleasant.

[Mouse]

Thank you Matthias - and thank you also for the rep

[arsheesh]

I nice simple piece. I like those trees of yours. I've not been satisfied with what I've been able to produce at this scale using GIMP, but seeing what you've been able to achieve makes me want to give learning a 3D program like Blender a try. The river and the roads I'm not as fond of. Given how crisp the rest of the map elements are the blurred edges of these elements seems out of place to me, and somewhat distracting. My 2c.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Mouse]

Thank you Arsheesh

Yes, looking at it fresh today after sleeping on it I can see what you mean. I might update it once I've finished reinstalling Windows.

Blender isn't the easiest thing to learn, but if you do decide to go down that route the trees are generated by a plug in called something like 'create sapling', or 'create tree', which you have to switch on yourself in the software. Then you have to arrange your tree with the options and texture the leaves and the bark. The lighting needs arranging so that you have 2 sun lamps - one on either side looking down at the tree at about 45 degrees. One of those sun lamps has to be very dim since it will act as backlighting in the otherwise totally black shadows. The camera has to be set up directly above the tree looking down on it, and then the scene rendered from Blender as a png file.

Once you set up a single scene this way, however, and providing you are careful to grow the tree last of all and don't click anything else, you can cycle through different trees by clicking the random seed in the 'create sapling' box.

Once you have about 20 (which seems to be a sufficient number of different trees for a map of this scale), you can open all the PNG files in GIMP and subtly alter the exact shade of green and how light or dark they each are to further increase the visible variation between the individual trees of the set.

And that's all there is to it

They aren't as good as trees made in Vue, or isolated from real photos, but they seem to work well enough for a map.

[arsheesh]

Thank you Arsheesh

Yes, looking at it fresh today after sleeping on it I can see what you mean. I might update it once I've finished reinstalling Windows.

Blender isn't the easiest thing to learn, but if you do decide to go down that route the trees are generated by a plug in called something like 'create sapling', or 'create tree', which you have to switch on yourself in the software. Then you have to arrange your tree with the options and texture the leaves and the bark. The lighting needs arranging so that you have 2 sun lamps - one on either side looking down at the tree at about 45 degrees. One of those sun lamps has to be very dim since it will act as backlighting in the otherwise totally black shadows. The camera has to be set up directly above the tree looking down on it, and then the scene rendered from Blender as a png file.

Once you set up a single scene this way, however, and providing you are careful to grow the tree last of all and don't click anything else, you can cycle through different trees by clicking the random seed in the 'create sapling' box.

Once you have about 20 (which seems to be a sufficient number of different trees for a map of this scale), you can open all the PNG files in GIMP and subtly alter the exact shade of green and how light or dark they each are to further increase the visible variation between the individual trees of the set.

And that's all there is to it

They aren't as good as trees made in Vue, or isolated from real photos, but they seem to work well enough for a map.

Thank you Mouse, that was really helpful

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Mouse]

Thank you very much for the rep, Arsheesh - much appreciated

This is a screen shot of the Blender file I used. I'm probably guilty here of trying to show too much, but I hope you can see the arrangement I set up with the camera, the tree and the two lamps lighting it. Its also quite important that the camera is set to orthographic, or the leaves on the top of the tree are very much larger than those further down. The tree itself is generated automatically from the menu I've left open for you to see. You get that tree thing there by switching on an option in the add on menu (not shown).

Tree machine.jpg

Another important thing is that the camera has to be set up to render the background as alpha, not sky, shown here (sorry about the very crude mouse-drawn red lines. My Wacom isn't working!)

Tree machine 2.jpg

If you do want to have a go at this and I've gone and forgotten to tell you something please give me a shout

When Win 10 has stopped messing my PC around I will update the map and get rid of the fuzzy lines

[FrancescaBaerald]

Lovely village map! I really like your ability to paint beautiful and clear maps.