FCAP #15
Show Notes:
- I had this one done a couple of days ago, but I decided to take one last crack at the encoding thing to see if I can come up with one that’ll be bulletproof in the future while keeping the quality as high as I can get it. Hopefully I’ve found the sweet spot now.
- Getting your forest to look like the ones in the Western Lands map takes time. You’ve really got to build up a lot of (virtual) paint. It’s time consuming, but hey, I never promised these would all be fast techniques! You can save yourself a bit of time, though, if you just go ahead and paint in the area where you want your forest to be in one stroke, then do the sponge technique on top of that.
- There’s still one small technique we have left to do to really finish off the forest, but it’s similar to one we’ll be using on the mountains as well, so I’ll be devoting a good chunk of next episode to it.
- Although you might think just by looking at it that I used a Blur or similar filter on the original map, I did not. It’s a) a pretty high resolution map, reduced in size for the web, which softened it up a bit, and b) built up with lots and lots of layers of color. You could certainly use a bit Gaussian Blur to save yourself a little time, though.
- You might also notice if you look closely that the forests in the eastern portion of the map are a bit more brownish/tannish. I didn’t save my brush in the tool presets, so I had to pick my colors all over again. I like that it has a little bit of variation though. If I had to I’d probably explain it away as a result of different trees being predominant in those areas.
Comments
Comment from Butch
Time: September 23, 2007, 10:16 am
I’ll sort-of cover them in the next podcast (I’ll talk about them briefly en route to talking about the mountains in the Western Lands), but there’ll be a more in-depth coverage of them in the book.
Comment from The Bane
Time: September 23, 2007, 12:15 pm
Is there any interest, by you, to receive and post viewer submissions of maps they have done based off of your podcasts?
Just wondering,
Bane
Comment from Butch
Time: September 23, 2007, 2:21 pm
If enough folks were interested and posted their creations on their own, I’d be more than happy to create a links page for them. 
Comment from David
Time: October 1, 2007, 10:46 am
I came across your videos when I was googling Campaign Cartographer versus Photoshop. Thanks so much for these tutorials. I’m leaning toward using Photoshop and adding graphic images from the CC3 sub-directories. I’m already familiar enough with Photoshop that it seems a shame to abandon it to climb the learning curve of CC3. Again, thanks so much for your wonderful videos!
Comment from Butch
Time: October 1, 2007, 11:29 am
Thanks so much David!
At some point, I’d like to switch the podcast over to cover RPG cartography in general rather than being quite so Photoshop-specific, so I can talk about other programs like Campaign Cartographer and the like, including bits on how to integrate them with Photoshop. (PS is my first love, of course, so it’ll always be part of the podcast!) I don’t expect that’ll happen until some time next year, though!
Comment from Anthony Hunter
Time: October 2, 2007, 10:05 am
As always Mr. Curry, great stuff.
Roughly when will we be seeing episode 16, and where to you anticipate covering how you to mountains? This is the part of my maps that usually gives me the biggest fits.
Thanks for sharing,
Anthony Hunter
Comment from Butch
Time: October 3, 2007, 7:29 am
I’m going to sit down and record episode 16 today, which will cover how I created the mountains for this one. Sometime this week or next, I’m going to sit down and record a special episode, “More Than Molehills”, where I’ll ramble on a bit about my half-assed cartography theories and explain why I don’t go into specifics when someone asks me, “How do I draw mountains?”
Comment from Anthony Hunter
Time: October 3, 2007, 11:01 am
Sweet. I look forward to seeing it.
Comment from Ray
Time: May 23, 2008, 1:13 pm
Butch,
Thanks so much for doing these podcasts. Been applying these techniques to my maps with great success, I even went out and got a copy of CS2 for reasonably cheap, my Waccom came with Elements but Elements just didn’t have all the features I needed. Anyway, these lessons have been an amazing boon to gaming maps, thanks again so much, can’t wait for the book.
Comment from Butch
Time: May 24, 2008, 5:19 pm
Thanks Ray!
Comment from The Bane
Time: September 22, 2007, 11:39 am
Could you demonstrate the Calmera and Dinosaur Island Mountains too? Or will this be in other podcasts?
Thanks for the GREAT work and tutelage!
Bane