It's just a rough. All of those labels and dots will be gone in the final version. I'm more worried about the actual placement and the names themselves.
I would say placement isn't so much a problem. But to echo SG, some of the labels are difficult to read (especially blue on blue). If you've got a plan to take care of that, grea. Otherwise, I'd agree with SG's assessment that an outer stroke/outerglow is in order to help make them readable. I believe RobA's tut covers that.
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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
A simple semi-transparent black layer underneath the whole thing does the job, I think.
Well, I went ahead and cobbled together some icons from various sources. Some of them are dingbat fonts, some are symbols found on the Internet and butchered by the GIMP (that sounds pretty twisted, huh?).
Anyway, a simple two-layer glow effect of different colors for the forts, ports, towns, and villages to bring them up. I made the forts a different style from the towns because I really wanted them to stand out, but I may have to add another glow layer underneath them to make them more noticable. I made the ziggurats and the rowboats from scratch. Tell me how you think they turned out.
After this, I start on labeling. That's gonna be fun, and by fun I mean tedious.
Love the scimitar icon!
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Yeah. I found a scimitar icon online, filled it in black to make a silhouette... and then decided that I didn't like it black, hollowed it out, and filled it in again. The end result looks better than the original, but still kind of a weird way to go about it, huh?
Whatever works...
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
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I'm getting reeeeeeeeal tired of GIMP's bulls***. I stupidly went to work labeling without saving and the damn thing crashed when my screen saver went on, killing about an hour of work. I had the entire Imperial section labeled, all the towns, forts, ports, regions, everything. Also, "Text to Path" is really only good for writing along a very simple arc, and "Path to Selection"-ing the text-adapted paths either takes ten minutes to process or just crashes GIMP entirely. Why the hell didn't they include text manipulation as a built-in feature? Freaking Microsoft Word has had built-in text manipulation since the nineties.
Ah, this is just me bitching. I need a new computer. My 2 GHz dual-core and 2 gigs of RAM aren't going to cut it much longer. At this rate I'll have to do a simplified big continent and then detail each quadrant of the Imperium individually. You can sort of see the thing I'm going for with the labeling here, the Dragonborn areas using an Arabian Nights-flavored typeface while the human areas have a good old fashioned Roman font.
EDIT: A bit of tinkering around in Inkscape has shown me the light. I accept Inkscape as my personal savior, and it is through this program that the grace of tracing text along a path and exporting it as a PNG shall be delivered. Kyrie eleison, amen, allahu akbar, etc.
Also, a bit more research has shown me just how rusty my Latin (and how non-rigorous my translation process) is. What I wrote as the thread title was "Heretical Empire of the Continuous Reduction." Terrae minorae means "of the smaller/lesser land," so I'll go with that for the final labeling. I need to brush up on this stuff.
EDIT: Updated with all the stuff that I lost. Feedback would be appreciated.
Last edited by Gregorus Prime; 09-26-2009 at 05:57 AM.
Yes-
Inkscape is the bee's knees for text on a curve, bezier handling, and general drawing. Much better than gimp imoo.
You might have interest in a little script I wrote for gimp to implement "file linked layers". It was requested on the gimp mailing list here and my response is here.
I use it by saving a png from inkscape, then loading it as a file linked layer into Gimp. Then any time I change it in inkscape and re-save the png, you can use the "reload" command to pull the layer back into Gimp. Saves a bit of time.
I used it extensively in my last map (the woodcut style).
-Rob A>
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A file linked layer in gimp?? That would be so awesome for the 150 labels I'm currently polishing ... how do you do that? I've been saving versions with tons of layers, then merging the layers in my working file, which leads to a LOT of closing, opening, merging and importing. A file link would be just what the dr ordered.
Edit: READ the post, Gidde. Disregard the how to question, I'll go get the script
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