# Making Campaign Maps



## JVisgaitis (Feb 9, 2007)

After the contest for the map for War of the Burning Sky, a lot of people have asked me my methods for creating my maps. I figured the best way would be to start a thread here. Before we start, we're going to need a campaign map to create. I don't want something overly complex, but if someone has a map they want created post it here and I'll use that for the tutorial. Otherwise, I'll just come up with something from Violet Dawn.


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## FunkBGR (Feb 9, 2007)

You could help me do my map - 

From my notes:
My campaign world features a large central continent with a madagascaran-like island off the west coast. Along the top is a set of mountains, which is your stereotypical "northlands", while a vast plain spreads south until you get to a vast belt of green forest that stretches the length until reaching a mountain range. South of the forest is another flat plain on the west, with an island chain stretching off to the southwest, and a jungle to east.

I don't have much more beyond that, because it hasn't been fleshed out. I don't even know how large the continent is, because that's all that has been explored so far. But I could upload a hand-drawn diagram outline (it would look pretty bad, hence me needing help).


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 9, 2007)

FunkBGR said:
			
		

> I don't even know how large the continent is, because that's all that has been explored so far. But I could upload a hand-drawn diagram outline (it would look pretty bad, hence me needing help).




That will work. Go ahead and upload it. I always work over a rough anyway...


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## terrainmonkey (Feb 9, 2007)

maybe you could give this one a shot? i did it in one day for the start of a new campaign, and just threw a bunch of stuff together. looking at the maps for the burning sky you did i was amazed. i thought about getting into that competitions but when they started coming in, i just decided to stop. too many better maps than i could have ever done. 

anyway, let me know.

http://s46.photobucket.com/albums/f127/terrainmonkey/?action=view&current=mindath2.jpg


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## FunkBGR (Feb 9, 2007)

Oh man - I can't find the larger version online, so I bet it's at the home computer.

I did this rough sketch two years ago as part of a website to give players an idea of relative geography. I also made a claim that I wasn't an artist (I think that's pretty clear). As such, I didn't fill in a lot of details in the areas.

The major forest in the middle is called the Greenwall - them's the elves. The island is called "Home", and inhabited by sailor halflings. The 'statue' symbol from old school red book D&D indicates capital cities of respective regions, which for the most part follow geographic features.

Bam! Good luck if you want to try it, and thanks!


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 9, 2007)

OK. I'll just do both and do a different style for each. One I'll do a more realistic hand drawn map like in Lord of the Rings (or my Burning Sky Map) and he other one I'll do in Photoshop using layers and styles (like my Castlemorn Map).  I'll put both of the maps below. Do either of you have a preference to which map gets what style?


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## FunkBGR (Feb 9, 2007)

Both look awesome, so I have no preference!


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## helium3 (Feb 9, 2007)

Cool thread. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.


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## industrygothica (Feb 10, 2007)

This is very cool of you to help out those of us who are less artistic.  Thank you.


-IG


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## terrainmonkey (Feb 10, 2007)

i like the bottom one, for the style of the campaign setting i have in mind. the one up top has a more FR quality to it, and would look good for a generic campaign. my world is less "sophisticated" than FR, with a more Dark Sun feel to it.

if you were going to do one of my realms, Mindath, take your time. i know how doing freebies can sometimes be a chore.


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 11, 2007)

OK so I'll do FunkBGR's map in the Photoshop style and terrainmonkey's map in the Lord of the Rings style. I just landed a huge freelance job, so we'll take this a bit at a time (hopefully one step every day or two). I'm going to start with FunkBGR's map first, since that one will be the quickest to do.

I'll start with a list of what I use and my first step. Currently I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3 (I'm beta testing it) and Painter X (I downloaded the trial version). One thing you definitely need when doing this is a graphics tablet. I'm currently using a wireless Wacom Graphire tablet. As far as graphic programs, I'm sure you can replace Photoshop with something like GIMP or Corel Draw. I've never used either, but I hear good things.

Once I have everything together, I take the original map that the author drew and scale that up to 150 DPI and I make the file 8 inches tall and let the Photoshop tell me how wide it should be by keeping the proportions. Over top of this, I create a new layer and start drawing the land in all black.

Now there are a hundred different ways you can do this. You can do this with a bezier pen as a vector shape, a pencil brush, the lasso selection tool, or another of other ways. However, I would steer away from using the magic wand as you'll only get really pixelated looking edges and you need a solid foundation to work on.

For this example, I used a small pencil to draw the outline of the land masses and filled them in with the paint bucket. Once you have that finished, you need to create an inverse of that on a new layer for the water. This is easy. I create a new layer in Photoshop. I put my mouse over the thumbnail of the land mass and hold down the Command Key (I'm on a Mac, so sorry if these short cut keys don't translate well) and click the layer. That creates a selection of everything on that layer. I then go to Select > Inverse and it selects all the water. I choose the layer I've made for the water and fill in white with the paint bucket. When your done, you end up with this:




This step took me about 5 minutes. Next time we'll start adding in some details.



			
				helium3 said:
			
		

> Cool thread. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.




Well, I'm going to do this a step at a time. As I go through the steps if you do something differently, chime in and let us know how you do it. There are hundreds of ways to do a map, and the more breadth we show the better.


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## jgbrowning (Feb 11, 2007)

JVisgaitis said:
			
		

> I'll start with a list of what I use and my first step. Currently I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3 (I'm beta testing it) and Painter X (I downloaded the trial version). One thing you definitely need when doing this is a graphics tablet. I'm currently using a wireless Wacom Graphire tablet. As far as graphic programs, I'm sure you can replace Photoshop with something like GIMP or Corel Draw. I've never used either, but I hear good things.




Jeff, I've just purchased a tablet and I'm finding it to be very nice. However, I only have illustrator and photoshop and not Painter or Draw. Would you consider those softwares to be essential? I've made one map so far and it was pretty good, but I'm having texture issues and think that I may have to spring for a real painter program to get what I want.

Anyway, sorry to hijack a bit, but I also want to say thanks for step-by-steps. They're tremendously helpful.

joe b.


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 11, 2007)

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Jeff, I've just purchased a tablet and I'm finding it to be very nice. However, I only have illustrator and photoshop and not Painter or Draw. Would you consider those softwares to be essential?




Joe, you're always free to highjack.  You can do textures in Photoshop and a lot of people that do digital work strictly use Photoshop. The way you have to do them in Photoshop doesn't work very well for me, so I just use Painter. When I get home, I'll post some texture brushes for Photoshop that should help you out. As to Draw, I've never used it so I can't speak on it at all. Maybe helium3 can chime in as I think he uses it. For digital work all you need is Photoshop and Painter. Any other program is just a waste of money IMO.


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 13, 2007)

Joe, here's a copy of those Photoshop Brushes I promised. I didn't realize how massive this download is. Its about 14 MB. Here's a link: http://www.icirclegames.com/external_images/ps_brushes.zip

So on to step 2. So I'm presenting this in a step by step basis, but I really don't have a set way to do any piece of artwork. I pretty much do whatever tickles my fancy and you should feel the same and be free flowing as you work. Basically this is the fun stage when your block in your color tones and texture.

I'm using some custom brushes for Painter which can be downloaded here: http://www.icirclegames.com/external_images/painter_brushes.zip As an aside, Painter is awesome in that this download is a paltry 300K compared to Photoshop's retardedly large file.

Anyhoo, in Painter I work on the land layer first and click preserve transparency so I don't need to worry about messing up the lines. I block in a tan color for the land using the Avadnu Brush. Switching to the water, I choose a nice blue that complements the land and block that in. Now we need some texture. I first lay in some darker and lighter colors using the Sponge brush. I do this on both the land and water using darker variants of the initial colors. Once I'm satisfied with the look, I switch to Dons and use Variable SplatterSkin. Again I choose lighter and darker blues and tans on the land and water respectively.

I save the file as a PSD and switch to Photoshop. I switch to the land layer and choose Layer Effects. Here I add a Stroke at 5 pixels in black. I also add an Outer Glow and change the Blend Mode to Normal, set the Spread to 36%, and the Size to 24 Pixels. You just have to play with the settings and get it the way you want so it looks good.

This step took me about 10-15 minutes. Next time we'll get some features on the map.


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 13, 2007)

FunkBGR said:
			
		

> I did this rough sketch two years ago as part of a website to give players an idea of relative geography.




You have to help me out on the geography features of your map. Are those two rivers that run east to west on your map or some kind of dividing line? Are those palm trees on the south end? Lastly, in the middle of the mountains, is that supposed to be a desert? Thanks!


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## FunkBGR (Feb 13, 2007)

It looks like you got it all completely right. There's a large forest in the middle that cuts this part of the continent in half. To the north and south of the forest, running horizontal to it, is indeed a river! To the south of it, is supposed to be jungle, with a more marshy terrain to the east of the jungle. And the mountains on the right do indeed surround a desert. The circles with the stars in them are supposed to be the largest cities on this part of the continent.

It's meant to represent a much larger area than it looks, but since anything looks better than what I have. I'll be happy to identify any other features too!


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## kensanata (Feb 13, 2007)

It looks awesome. I'll have to try and reproduce something like it using Gimp...


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## terrainmonkey (Feb 13, 2007)

> OK so I'll do FunkBGR's map in the Photoshop style and terrainmonkey's map in the Lord of the Rings style. I just landed a huge freelance job, so we'll take this a bit at a time (hopefully one step every day or two). I'm going to start with FunkBGR's map first, since that one will be the quickest to do.




the map of mindath was done in coreldraw 12. if you need the file, i can send it to you, or at least the bitmaps. i'm not sure how the files would transfer from corel to photoshop, having never used it before. what you're doing here is great though! keep up the good work.


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## jgbrowning (Feb 13, 2007)

JVisgaitis said:
			
		

> Joe, here's a copy of those Photoshop Brushes I promised. I didn't realize how massive this download is. Its about 14 MB.




Thank ye! 

joe b.


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## kensanata (Feb 14, 2007)

*For all the Gimp Headz out there...*

I'm working on it!






(Flickr Page)

Using the Gimp, I had trouble importing the Photoshop brushes. I've read on various web pages that you can either convert old brushes using a command-line tool, or you can just use the brushes as-is if you have a new Gimp. I'm using 2.2.13 and haven't managed. If anybody knows how to do it, let me know. 

You absolutely need the Layer Effects plugin!

So I drew the land and the ocean and filled both layers with colors, and then, since I had no brushes, I added noise instead. I used one transparent layer with noise at about 67% opacity and "substraction" mode, gaussian blur with radius 5, and another transparent layer with green noise at about 90% opacity in "addition"mode, gaussian blur with radius 3, just to give the land-mass and the oceans a slighly different "feel".

I then used the layer effects plugin as suggested, using "Add Border (stroke)" and "Outer Glow", experimenting with the parameters and the layer opacity to get the desired effect.

I can provide the XCF file on demand.

As you can see, the colors are still too regular on a large scale. I'll have to experiment a bit. Not knowing what JVisgaitis is going to do next, I did some experiments resulting in some rather dark patches, because I liked the looks of it. Might be inappropriate when we start placing mountains, however: 






Create a new layer, render plasma cloud with turbulence around 4, desaturate it (resulting in a black and white layer), duplicate it (resulting in a cloud layer #1  and #2). Move to the ocean layer, choose alpha to selection from the transparency menu, move to cloud layer #1 and cut (leaving a cloud landmass), move back to the ocean layer, choose alpha to selection again, invert it, move to cloud layer #2 and cut. Now you have two cloud layers, one applying to the ocean, and one applying to the landmass. I set the ocean clouds to subtract mode at opacity 40 (if subtracting too much, the ocean turns black), and the landmass clouds to subtract mode at opacity 70...

Yikes, I'm learning more Gimp in half an hour than I wanted to know in years!


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## FunkBGR (Feb 15, 2007)

Not sure if it'd help, but for people using GIMP - 

  This guy took some open source GIMP, and made it more user-friendly to Photoshop users
http://www.gimpshop.com/


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 15, 2007)

kensanata said:
			
		

> I'm working on it!




Hey, that looks great! I'm in an artistic funk with this right now. On the map I have that I'm working on I have mountains, swamp, and the desert, but I hate it so I'm not posting it. What I did add is rivers which is really easy and I like how they came out.

For the rivers I took the file into Painter and drew them on their own layer using the Scratchboard variant under Pens. You need to exaggerate the look of your rivers so that the stroke and glow you have around the land works. After I have them drawn in, I take the file back into Photoshop. I select everything on the rivers layer and switch to the land layer and hit the delete key. Voila, instant rivers! One problem I have is because I didn't account  for the rivers in the beginning, they don't have the blue texture in them from the rest of the water layer. I use the Rubber Stamp and draw the rivers back in. You can't really see it on this layer because of the glow, but it does show on the highres.

This step took me about 15 minutes cuz I had to keep tweaking it to my liking. Hopefully I can get out of this funk and get some mountains on the map next time.


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## kensanata (Feb 15, 2007)

This is so cool. [imager]http://farm1.static.flickr.com/156/391518125_da0a5465dc_m.jpg[/imager]

If you're doing this in the Gimp: Make sure the lowest layer is the ocean layer, and make it all blue. The part below the land mass is not required to be transparent; in fact, we want a little blue to shine through and color the rivers. Create a new layer, take a pencil (I used circle07), and draw rivers. Use alpha to selection to select just them, move to the land layer and cut. You should see the ocean shining through. If you added any borders and glow, delete these layers and redo it, so that the glow fills the rivers and the border follows the rivers. The glow used the color white, glow radius 15, blur radius 10, and opacity 75; the border was a free border of size 4 and opacity 80. Then switch to the border line layer and use a gaussian blur of radius 2 to soften it.

At a larger resolution (Flickr page) you can see that I used a lousy touch pad to draw the rivers. If I were doing a real map, I'd draw it using a pencil and scan it instead, since I don't own a tablet.

I haven't managed to get those pointy river sources in the Gimp. Does anybody know how to do it? Or is that what you get for using a pressure sensitive tablet?


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 15, 2007)

kensanata said:
			
		

> I haven't managed to get those pointy river sources in the Gimp. Does anybody know how to do it? Or is that what you get for using a pressure sensitive tablet?




That's something you get with the scratchboard tool and pressure sensitivity with a tablet. You shouldn't have a problem creating this in the Gimp tho, but it is a bit more work. You can try using a real thin eraser brush (like 1 pixel diameter) on the land layer and just creating them on the fly with your layer effects on so you can see the results. Just erase out to a point. You can also try just using the Lasso select tool and making a point and just deleting. Again, just do this directly on the land layer so you can delete and see the results.

One thing you want to be careful of (and I know you said your working on a touchpad) is watching for overlap and unnatural straight lines with your rivers. I see that in a couple of areas and its an easy fix. I even had some of those that I had to straighten up. You can just paint land back directly onto the land layer to fix those.

Its very cool that someone else is working along with me. Anyone else want to share what they're doing? The point of me doing this is to help you out, so I'll gladly answer questions.


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## James Heard (Feb 16, 2007)

I knocked this out in Photoshop in a few hours, including a lot of loafing around. There are probably a lot of goof-ups and artifacts in mine, because I was pressing for a quick finish and "how would that work?" rather than perfection.

The basic landmass outlines were done more or less similarly to other people's ideas on how to do so, though I scrubbed out textures onto the base forms by hand because with a big enough brush I just like it more for control. Then I doodled out templates for the base shapes, a mountain template for the mountains, the One Tree by which all trees are formed, etc. Then I resized them to be tiny, copied them, and banged out everything in a Paste--->Move fashion (sometimes making larger groups to make it easier) and it was done pretty quickly. I tossed some watercolor and colored pencil effects on the grouped and merged shapes, and finally finished it off by desaturating it some because I thought it looked a little more like a computer map with the brighter colors than I was happy with.


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## FunkBGR (Feb 16, 2007)

Wow

I'm going to sit down with GIMP this weekend and try to follow along. I'm not expecting much, but even if I get more familiar with the program, I'll be happier.

These are looking really nice . . .


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## kensanata (Feb 16, 2007)

JVisgaitis said:
			
		

> You can try using a real thin eraser brush (like 1 pixel diameter) on the land layer and just creating them on the fly with your layer effects on so you can see the results. Just erase out to a point.




I will have to try that and redo the border.



			
				JVisgaitis said:
			
		

> Its very cool that someone else is working along with me.




Actually this "one step every couple of days" format works very well for me. Just the right pacing, hehe.


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## helium3 (Feb 16, 2007)

If you're interested in making your map really ssssllllooowwwwllllyyyy like I did, you can:

(A) Draw out the different pieces of the map in pencil.
(B) Sketch your final image with pen.
(C) Erase all of the rest of the pencil, but don't worry to much about getting all of it. Just make sure it's significantly lighter than the ink.
(D) Scan the pen drawings in and use photo editing software (I use Microsoft Photo Editor, which came bundled with my ancient copy of office) to crop out everything but the part's relevant to your map.
(E) Save the cropped scans as bitmap files.
(F) Import the bitmaps into Inkscape and use the Trace>Bitmap command to edge your ink drawings.
(G) Delete the traced bitmaps.

This leaves you with a nice vector object that you can fiddle around with.

If you want an object to have color in it, you have two options:

(1) you can export the object as a bitmap and use Microsoft Paint to fill in all the white spaces (or whatever your background color is) with whatever color you want and then reimport that colored bitmap to your drawing or

(2) You can create colored objects that precisely match the borders of your vector object and put the colored objects behind the tracings.

In my map, the coastline and ocean swells are done with the first method and the rest of the parts of the map are with the 2nd.

Once you've got your map assembled from the tracings and background bitmap you can re-export the whole shebang as another bitmap.


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## kensanata (Feb 16, 2007)

Oh, I didn't know about this use of Inkscape. Excellent! I wondered how you had created your map in the competition. (A favorite of mine!)


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## helium3 (Feb 16, 2007)

Yeah. It's pretty cool because you can get a nice clean looking map that doesn't suffer from having the same object copied and pasted over and over. It's really time consuming though. I spent four workdays on it, though half of that was on the first iteration of the map that I put together before the much more detailed map was posted.


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## JVisgaitis (Feb 21, 2007)

Sorry I'm falling behind on this. New York Comic Con is this weekend, and I'm inundated with freelance work. Hopefully I can post the new update in a day or two...


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## FunkBGR (Feb 21, 2007)

It's cool - Comic Con > all!

I've alerted my group to this thread, and some of them have decided to try their hand. I'll see if I can get any of them to post 'em. I was going to sit down over the weekend, but grad school applications caught up to me, so I'll to postpone it for a bit.


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## catsclaw227 (Feb 21, 2007)

JVisgaitis said:
			
		

> Sorry I'm falling behind on this. New York Comic Con is this weekend, and I'm inundated with freelance work. Hopefully I can post the new update in a day or two...




I will start to follow along as well.  I just downloaded the trial of Painter X and I ordered my Wacom tablet.  They both look pretty sweet.


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## kensanata (Feb 23, 2007)

helium3 said:
			
		

> (F) Import the bitmaps into Inkscape and use the Trace>Bitmap command to edge your ink drawings.




Can you offer some more details, here? I tried this yesterday and it was terribly slow and the result was terrible. What resolution did you use? I used my scan directly (over 2000x1000 px) and perhaps that isn't necessary. Did you postprocess the scan in any way such as reducing it to two colors? My scan was a pencil (not pen) scan, which I had then postprocessed streching levels until it looked pleasing to the eye – white background and near-black foreground. When I tried tracing the bitmap in Inkscape, what I got was in different shades of gray, and it looked as if it had been traced two or three times in some places. As if somebody had traced it twice with a 60% opacity gray pen. Perhaps you can share some of the bitmap tracing settings you used?


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## helium3 (Feb 23, 2007)

kensanata said:
			
		

> Can you offer some more details, here? I tried this yesterday and it was terribly slow and the result was terrible. What resolution did you use? I used my scan directly (over 2000x1000 px) and perhaps that isn't necessary. Did you postprocess the scan in any way such as reducing it to two colors? My scan was a pencil (not pen) scan, which I had then postprocessed streching levels until it looked pleasing to the eye – white background and near-black foreground. When I tried tracing the bitmap in Inkscape, what I got was in different shades of gray, and it looked as if it had been traced two or three times in some places. As if somebody had traced it twice with a 60% opacity gray pen. Perhaps you can share some of the bitmap tracing settings you used?




My drawings were first sketched out with pencil and then I traced the final image with an ink pen and erased as much of the old pencil marks as possible.

I scanned most of the images in parts, though the coastline and the waves were done as a single piece.

I always scanned my images to a resolution of 2048 X 1736.

When I did the trace, I used the single pass brightness trace usually at a setting of "0.55". I think you were using the grayscale multi-pass trace and yeah you're going to get something that looks really weird if you do that.


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## kensanata (Feb 24, 2007)

helium3 said:
			
		

> When I did the trace, I used the single pass brightness trace usually at a setting of "0.55". I think you were using the grayscale multi-pass trace and yeah you're going to get something that looks really weird if you do that.




Indeed, you were right. I tried with 0.45, 0.55, and finally 0.88 and that was ok. I think I'll have to work on map features, however. The way I like to draw forests, for example, is by drawing lots of little n shapes. These are not readily filled with green... I guess I'll have to draw a few complete trees, filled with green, and assemble them into a brush. Then I can draw forests to my heart's content.


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## helium3 (Feb 25, 2007)

kensanata said:
			
		

> Indeed, you were right. I tried with 0.45, 0.55, and finally 0.88 and that was ok. I think I'll have to work on map features, however. The way I like to draw forests, for example, is by drawing lots of little n shapes. These are not readily filled with green... I guess I'll have to draw a few complete trees, filled with green, and assemble them into a brush. Then I can draw forests to my heart's content.




I need to look at the whole brush thing, though in general I don't like using stuff that ends up looking really repetative.


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