map icon creation

[Bog97th]

Dose anyone have a link to sites or have any good ways of making map symbols or icons?

I have used Fractal mapper,djinni and CC.

Thanks Robert

[Redrobes]

Sorta depends on what your after. Kimmo's 12 rounds thread has some nice characters done with Poser, Devin has drawn loads of characters and monsters presumably with a pen tablet, theres 3D rendered cars and sci-fi bits, real world clipped up textures for terrain. The dundjinni forums have loads of downloadable content for your app. Torstan is doing some nice dungeon bits, theres the RPTools forums, BattlegroundRPG forums, theres a big collection called the CUSAC which have thousands of items and bits of stuff. These are mostly PNG files with a transparency layer in them - the RGBA ones. You put the transparent bits with a low alpha (A) bit and the color into the RGB bit of it. Use photoshop or Gimp to do that. Dunno what else I can add really.

[Midgardsormr]

I like to use Illustrator for my symbols, but Inkscape is a free open source alternative that has similar functionality. It doesn't have as many features as Illustrator, but it's still a quite powerful piece of software.

It's also relatively easy to use. It doesn't feel as foreign to Windows users as the Gimp (an open source Photoshop alternative) does.

[Fabrice]

If you are still using Campaign Cartographer, there was an issue in this year's Annual teaching how to convert font special characters into symbols useable in CC3. Considering the wealth of free fonts out there, it could be something to look at if you do not mind black & white symbols.

[NeonKnight]

I will agree with what others have said. A little more input of what exactly you are looking for, would go a long way to answering your questions.

[Mark Oliva]

I have to ditto on the need to know more about what you want to create.

Our Vintyri (TM) Project is at present writing a free and open tutorial (PDF) that will deal with making raster (bitmap) symbols with Fractal Mapper (TM) 8 and then adding transparency with Paint.NET. There is no release date yet, but I expect it to be available sometime in autumn. You might want to check our homepage after summer's over.

[Bog97th]

What I meant was, icons used for the maps in general. Objects,vegetation,buildings,people ect....
I will be very interested in the PDF spoken of above. I use fractal Mapper a lot.

I guess if I knew the ins and out of photoshop I might use that more but for me Fractal Mapper is much faster.

[Ascension]

There are bunch of things in the Reference section and the Elements section.

[RobA]

Do you want photorealistic or symbol style? Many of the people at the Dundjinni forums use Daz to create their objects in 3D and render them

There was a lot of use of Deep Paint (version 2) but that produce no longer exists. (It used a 2.5D mode where you could set light locations and textures then draw stacked vector objects). Other than that any paint program can be used.

If you want mode icon/symbol shapes, a vector program like Illustrator or Inkscape is the better way to go.

-Rob A>