Adventures in amateur topography

[rjlee]

Hi everyone--

I have been enjoying the wonderful map mods that people have created for FCRS, and so I thought I would share the results of some graphic experimentation that I have recently done. I am not a mapmaker myself and was only doing some art for a very small map portion for purposes of illustrating an AAR, but perhaps those of you who are able to tackle the big task of painting an entire map will find this useful.

(Tools: I am using a software package called Ortelius (http://www.mapdiva.com/ortelius/), which is a vector graphics program for the Mac specifically designed for artistic cartography. It's not that different from most vector graphics programs, but comes with some clever custom tools for doing things like drawing road networks. There is a free demo available.)

The focus of my experiment was how to portray different terrain levels in FCRS in a useful way. I started with the classic method: including a drop shadow under each terrain "layer." The result below is pretty typical.

The advantage to this method is that it is very easy to see the relative terrain levels. It is intuitive, and not too ugly. But, it does tend to exaggerate terrain differences, and to me, it also disrupts some of the immersion because the shadows give the appearance of each terrain layer "floating" above the other. At times it starts to feel like you are trying to fight a war on a series of floating platforms. It looks a bit un-military, and for AAR purposes, the shading sometimes can create too dark a background for annotating the graphic.

[rjlee]

So next I tried something a little bit different. Ortelius has an "embankment" graphic that appears as a series of triangular points (like spikes) coming down the sides of a hilltop. I tried a combination of techniques. From level 0 to level 1, I used the standard drop shadow. But from level 1 to level 2, and level 2 to level 3, I used the embankment graphic.

The results weren't bad, and I think it provides an interesting look, almost like an old hand-drawn map. I experimented with different colors, and found that a light brown seemed to work best. There are some obvious problems, however -- the "spikes" do not stack well, and they seem to suggest "fortifications" to me, which is confusing. And the drop shadows for level 0 to 1 are still stylistically inconsistent.

Why not use the spikes for level 0 to 1 as well, to avoid the inconsistency? Well, it turns out that the spike graphic is extremely processor-intensive. Even on my small map excerpt, using it on all of the terrain levels would slow my system to a crawl.

[rjlee]

To dispense with drop shadows entirely, I tried a technique that was originally intended to draw coastlines. This involves outlining the edge of the terrain with a very rough brush stroke, using a semi-transparent layer. I applied this to each of the terrain transitions (0 to 1, 1 to 2, and 2 to 3), and kept the spikes for the top two levels so that it would be easy to distinguish them.

(Don't mind the washed-out color...I was also experimenting with desaturation so that annotations would be more visible on the map. Also don't mind the awful color selection for now.)

The effect was interesting, and I think it's pretty easy to tell 0-1 from 1-2, but honestly I'm not thrilled with this approach.

[rjlee]

Next I thought about real topographical maps and whether elevation lines would be doable. Obviously there really isn't a functional need for elevation lines in FCRS (I forget who in the forum called it a "stack of pancakes" -- but this is a very good description). But, from an aesthetic perspective maybe this is worth looking at.

Doing this in the Ortelius software is unusually complicated, but basically I had the program take each terrain "slab" and draw a certain of concentric outlines, maybe 3-4 of them. The program is a bit fidgety about this sort of thing so the lines are sometimes uneven on different sides, but the effect looks OK. I then ran into the problem of overlapping concentric lines for two adjacent pieces of terrain, which looked very bad, so I solved it by having the program draw another shape under everything else at exactly the size of the outermost elevation line. Then I filled it with the same color as the terrain slab. For the lines themselves, brown seemed to work best.

The look is pretty good, I think, but one thing to watch for in real maps is that this approach expands the size of a terrain feature, possibly outside the hex boundaries. This became a problem for the level 1 terrain, which is adjacent to a river. I was able to solve this by having the program draw the elevation lines "inside" the level 1 shapes, thus preserving the original boundaries and saving myself a lot of work. Unfortunately this came with a cost later.

[rjlee]

I tried one last thing. While I was pretty happy with the way the "elevation lines" came out, they still seemed flat. Adding a drop shadow didn't help (it produces an awful result that spoils the illusion of elevation lines entirely). I don't have the artistic eye to manually paint terrain shading on top of things. So I came up with something else.

Each terrain block is a "sandwich" of layers, from top to bottom:

1. The top surface of the terrain block -- this is basically just the shape of the slab, filled in the proper color, and opaque.
2. A series of hollow 3-5 concentric elevation lines radiating from (and lying outside) of the terrain block.
3. A filled shape that is equal to the largest concentric circle, filled with the same color as the top surface. This fills the unsightly gap in between the elevation lines.

I decided to insert another layer between #2 and #3, congruent to the filled shape in #3. But this layer (call it "layer 2.5") would be filled with a semi-transparent gradient running from one side of the shape to the other. On the left side would be a "bright" color, and it would gradually blend into a "dark" color on the right side. It would be semi-transparent, so the effect would be to "tint" layer 3 below it. On the left side it would be bright, and on the right side it would be dark, as if the sun was shining from the left. This would only affect the area between the elevation lines, because layer #1 would block everything else on top (and since it was on top of the new layer 2.5, it would be unaffected by the tinting.

The result, I think, is pretty good for something that haphazardly put together. Of course, the problem was that I couldn't apply it to level 1, since the elevation lines were drawn inside the shape. I tried an approach that should have worked in theory, but there seems to be a problem in Ortelius with creating a "shrunken" filled shape. Oh well. We'll just pretend that the sunlight is very limited down there.

[rjlee]

If anyone is interested, this is what the full map looks like at this point -- it is a slice outside Bad Neustadt where much of the action in "A Time to Dance" occurs. Unfortunately it is not scaled to work with the game and cannot be imported as a custom map...as I said, I developed it to illustrate an AAR. (In fact, I think I used Plodder's or William's popular maps to trace the features -- I didn't even go back to the original map data.)

Perhaps some of the talented mapmakers here might find these experiments interesting for their work. In any event, I'd like to express my thanks for the contributions of the community -- I am thoroughly hooked on the game and the mods posted here. Looking forward to 2.04!

[Werewolf13]

Excellent work. Very nice.

I especially like the way you did the elevated areas.

[CapnDarwin]

Looks really good. One thing to keep in mind is having a consistent and visually distinctive color for each of the 10 elevations we support in game. Maybe room for more elevations after that.

[Mad Russian]

Interesting. I have an idea that the map makers will always be tinkering with maps for this game. What I find interesting is that at this point most of the new maps done are reworks of the maps we included in the game. Until those have been done to everyone's satisfaction it appears there may not be new maps forthcoming for a bit.

Thanks for your interest in the game and for sharing your experiences in making different map sets. Diversity is what makes the world go round.

Good Hunting.

MR

[MikeAP]

Love the artwork! Very subtle and soft. The elevation contour lines are great!

[Plodder]

ORIGINAL: MikeAP

Love the artwork! Very subtle and soft. The elevation contour lines are great!

+1. Are you able to easily change the level colours? If you can, try the official ones, I'd really like to see the result.

[Phoenix100]

Looks superb, I think, very clean and clear. I would use it, if I could. Thanks.

[Mad Russian]

ORIGINAL: The Plodder

ORIGINAL: MikeAP

Love the artwork! Very subtle and soft. The elevation contour lines are great!

+1. Are you able to easily change the level colours? If you can, try the official ones, I'd really like to see the result.

+1.

Good Hunting.

MR

[rjlee]

Thanks, all. I fiddled with things a bit more and found what I think is a better approach to the contour lines than what I was using before (the details are not very interesting but basically my old approach generated contour lines as a percentage function of the entire shape size, which meant that for very big terrain shapes the contour lines were getting completely out of control). Instead, I found a way to fix the contour lines at a standard distance, and also to place all contour lines "inside" the shapes, which allows for better control over the edges. There is still some weird behavior where the contour lines will be "inverted" (internal vs. external) -- apparently shapes have a "direction" when they are created -- but that's a technicality.

The result is faster and doesn't bog down the computer. I can also alter the type of contour line (dotted, dashed, etc.) for decorative effect. I have dispensed with the "3D" edge highlighting for now, as I've decided it seems a bit cartoony.

Here is the Bad Neustadt map from yesterday retrofitted for the new style. It's not quite right as the terrain shapes were drawn with the expectation of an external contour line, but you get the idea.

[rjlee]

On color selection: yes, the colors for the different levels are defined in a set of standard styles, so it's trivial to replace the color schemes (or any other aspect of the style) to experiment. Here is the same map with the original color scheme (light to dark with rising elevation). For convenience I didn't import the whole texture, but rather just sampled a pixel from each of L1 through L4, so it's still flat and not as vibrant as what appears out of the box. Because the backgrounds are dark, I also had to invert the contour lines so you could see them.

I'm still struggling with color selection. My intent was to adopt a "classic" hypsometric tint (hey, there's a big word I learned on Wikipedia) consisting of "dark greens at low elevations, progressing through yellows and ochers, to browns and then grays and white at the highest elevations." Not so sure it's really working here. I might also try using the color of the contour lines to indicate elevation while staying with a more flat colors overall -- probably worse for playing the game but better for illustrating an AAR.

By the way, just to clarify, by posting all of this I don't mean to suggest that I find the existing maps (whether mods or out-of-the-box) to be unsatisfactory. For AAR purposes, I was looking for a way to create maps that (a) are infinitely scalable so I can "zoom" in on the action; and (b) are a bit less busy (i.e., they don't need all of the gameplay-relevant information) so that I can put my graphic overlays on them. Google Maps is OK but of course doesn't really match the scenario layout, so I thought I'd tinker a bit. (As usual, a bit of "tinkering" has now gone completely out of control.)