How was this map made?

[xeyla]

I have always loved the style of Faerun Maps. I'd like to ask if anyone here knows how they were made, or if they could give me some tips to duplicate the style? I have an idea on how the forests were made, maybe with a pattern and mask? But how were the mountains made? Are they a certain brush? Can they be made into brushes, or are they a pattern also? The mountains are confusing me, I can't figure out how to do them without being freehand.
http://www.pocketplane.net/volothamp...aerunlarge.jpg

Thank you for any help.

[Midgardsormr]

There's a style available for Campaign Cartographer 3 that simulates those maps quite well. http://www.profantasy.com/annual/2009/february09.html

That will require CC3 and Volume 3 of the Cartographer's Annual.

It's also possible to make mountains like those with a technique similar to the caterpillar brushes shown here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ht=caterpillar

[Jaxilon]

And then sometimes if you want to make a handmade map you just have to make it by hand. I'm pretty sure Mike just drew them by hand.

[xpian]

That's one of the middle-era Faerun maps...not as old as the ultra-simple ones from the late '80s, and not as painterly or illustrative as the newer ones from people like Blando and Schley.

It's still a fairly simple style. To answer your questions...I don't know for sure but I can take educated guesses.
1) Mountains and Hills: very likely drawn by hand in terms of the ridge and contour lines. Then painted with simple, semi-transparent color layers to build up the basic shadow/highlight scheme. Pretty basic by the standards of the work on our site here.
2) Forests: Outlines look like they're hand-drawn. It's possible the leafy "dots" within the borders of the forests are some sort of layer style or scattery brush that was masked out so that it only shows within the border. The green fills could be a layer style of some sort, but it's just as likely that stuff was hand-dotted and hand painted (perhaps digitally, in Photoshop or something)
3) Rivers: look very much hand-drawn
4) Coastline & Ocean: might be some subtle, washed out photoshop layer effects here, or at least some big, masked blurring

Like I said, I'm not sure who did this one. It wouldn't surprise me to find that Mike Schley did it early in his career, because it's so similar to a style he uses these days, but which is much more refined:
Mike-Schley----Silver-Marches-aka-Luruar.jpg

Can you make brushes for those hills? Easily. Can you make a layer style that will replicate those mountains? That's a bit tougher, especially if you really like the hand-drawn look. Could you build an Adobe Illustrator vector graphic style that would replicate those forests? I'm pretty sure you could get darn close.

[J.Edward]

The best I could find is that there are 3 cartographers listed for the maps in FR campaign setting 3rd edition - Dennis Kauth [RIP], Rob Lazzaretti [map lead at the time] and Todd Gamble [quoted as saying that Rob taught him]. I would assume it was Rob Lazzaretti who did that map, as the lead carto at TSR/Wizards at the time. It doesn't fit kauth's style and Gamble was newer. Maybe collaborative, who can say. I would assume that Wizards either sought Schley out for having a similar style, or more likely asked him to produce in a similar style. And then he just took it further and better.
From what I can tell Mike does not come around much but obviously he could tell you.

[xeyla]

Thank you for this info, I didn't expect such wonderful replies. I will check out those Caterpillar brushes, I had no idea there were brushes like that. It's exciting to know that the cartographers for those maps actually hung out here! Sadly I do not own CC3 yet. And I love that map example you have shown. The details are amazing! I do own the actual map itself, and an older/simpler version as well that is printed on heavy weight paper, and not laminated or glossy like the "newer" ones I have. Well, 2 of the simpler map (They came with a 2ED campaign setting box I bought from a flea market years ago. I was excited I actually found a campaign box).

Thank you for this, you guys have made my day today. I'm so glad I asked here.

One last question: How would I make my own caterpillar brushes? I did a google search, and it gave me actual "caterpillar" brushes, like stamps of caterpillars. Sometimes google is special. I searched "how to make caterpillar brushes for photoshop".

[Gamerprinter]

I sometimes do somewhat similar style to these maps. The way I'd do this style is all the line work as hand-drawn with pen & ink, digitally scanned, imported to Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 (my preferred vector application I use for mapping), then all the water color in the finish as vector shapes with fractal color fills placed beneath the hand-drawn linework. I don't use caterpillar brushes, rather I hand-draw every line in the caterpillar work - though I am extremely fast at both drawing and finishing in digital graphics applications.

[Midgardsormr]

Heh. Well, "caterpillar" as a style for mountain illustration is jargon for a very small community. I doubt you'd have much luck in the wider 'net finding something useful.

To make a brush of this sort, start with a single black stroke in the shape of your desired hachure. (A hachure is the technical term for the lines perpendicular to a ridge-line, indicating the direction of the slope. They may be tapered so that the wider end is higher elevation, or if the ridgeline itself might be indicated, in which case the "open" end is lower than the "closed" end.) Crop that line such that you have an image that is very tight to the width but twice as long as the line, with the ridge-line end in the center of the image. Make a brush out of that image. In the brush settings, you want rotate it so that the hachure appears perpendicular to your paint stroke, with spacing to taste, and a little bit of jitter in the size. Maybe just a little bit of scatter, too, to break up the computer-generated precision. You can scale a brush non-proportionately, too, allowing you to make longer or shorter hachures.

The trick of making half of the brush transparent also makes it simpler to stroke paths with it. The hachures only appear on one side of the stroke, so you can get both the ridge and the hachures from the same path.

[J.Edward]

Here's an option that may work for you. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=27948