Interesting Technique for Hex Maps

[RobA]

To get rid of the stuff in the middle of the cells (mountian symbold, plains symbols, etc)

-Rob A>

[Hawke]

Very cool! I love what you did with the map, I hadn't ever thought about anything like that. Sort of reminds me of HeroScape.

[RPMiller]

Welcome Hawke! Hawke is from the MapTool forums and the creator of that hex map in case anyone is wondering.

You play HeroScape? HeroScape is big fun. I own pretty much everything for it. Although this latest Wave has been difficult to find.

[RobA]

I didn't like the way that turned out, so like a dog with a bone I kept at it.

Here is what I did finally-

Took the crude grayscale heightfield I made from the map-

selected everything but the sea level and blurred the heck out of it. Added a low detail rendered cloud layer over that to add a little variation to each of the tiles on the same level-


Then I sucked that into Inkscape, and used the Tiled Clones feature with trace colour turned on (starting with a suitably distorted hex that lined up with the map...which was an exercise in trial and error to get the original hex scaled right). I also overlayed a smallblack blurry outline to the cloned hexes that I hoped would make a bevel when rendered. I exported this out of Inkscape at a very high resolution (>5000px horizontal) so the height filed would be smooth.

Final Map:
hf_ink_hq.png

-Rob A>

[RPMiller]

That worked great!

[pyrandon]

What an interesting experiment. The final, pre-painted b&w image was especially provocative--mainly due to the light & shadow suggestions. These, however, were all but lost in the next versions. I'd be interested in seeing you use that earlier image as an overlay on the final map, so the lower hexes were darker and such. Is that possible?

[RobA]

C'mon Don - everything is possible, just depends on the time a person wants to spend doing it!

I think this is what you wanted to see... I should have masked out the dark grey areas, but forgot to, so they ended up really black.

The whole thing could probably use a gamma adjustment, too...

-Rob A>

[ravells]

Rob....you are just....a genius. Your talent for working out how to get the software to do what you want it to (rather than just to rely on happy accidents, which is what I do) and then to explain it clearly, really is amazing. And the number of styles that you're able to reproduce again, is wonderful.

Ravs

[RobA]

That is why I don't consider myself artistic....

But I am a pretty good copier!

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

Can you make this map sit up and bark, too? How about get me a brewski from the fridge? Is there anything you CAN'T make a map do????