Map: Mapping tutorial + Wrappy Land of Wrappy Wrappiness (55+4)

[elmokki]

I have too much time for now, so I thought I'd make what the topic tells this is. I'm using a Finnish GIMP, which may make things a little harder, but I reckon everything should be understandable.

So, let's start. First of all you'll have to decide on the map size. You can't really guesstimate the province amount you'll get that accurately, as different people draw different sized provinces on maps and water provinces generally tend to be bigger. For example, I drew 231 land and 17 sea provinces to Riverlands, and a friend of mine who made a non-wraparound version drew only 164 land provinces, but whopping 36 sea provinces. Anyway, as an example for image sizes correlating with province amount:

- Spine of the World, 600x600, 53+4
- Land of Pareto Effiency, 800x800, 49+9
- Streamlands, 900x900, 93+10
- Land of Ethereal Squirrels, 1000x1000, 103+13
- Plane of Rusty Nails, 1200x1200, 143+12
- Riverlands, 1400x1400, 231+17

This map will be a small wraparound. Small because I'm not feeling like spending too much time and wraparound because I have to include that in the tutorial. In general the less provinces you have on map edges, the easier making a wraparound gets. Hence people often put sea to the edges, as sea provinces tend to be bigger. Let's say this'll be a non-square map for once, and create a 600x800 image in GIMP.

The first step when creating a map is to draw the land masses. For this I use the color picking tool to pick the dark brown color I've used to separate land and water before. For drawing the land masses you want to use the pencil tool, not the brush tool (ie use the tool with a pencil in the picture). That's because the brush tool uses antialiasing, which makes filling the seas and the lands later much more painful. You'll want to use something like Circle (3) as the brush for your pencil tool.

If you're drawing sea areas that end at the edges of the map, you'll have to ensure they wrap around properly by continuing on the exact other side of the map. I won't even give you a picture about this, as it's pretty simple. When your beachline ends at the top of the image, you'll continue at the same x cordinate at the bottom of the image and vice versa. When your beachline ends at the left side of the image, you'll continue at the same y cordinate at the right side of your image and vice versa. This is also the cheap and quick method for drawing province borders around your wrap later. I'll give you a picture showing how a big lake in the middle (rather unoriginal choice, by the way) looks like below. Before that I'll have to draw rest of my land mass though, as I didn't finish the rivers yet. The idea of rivers is, that you'll hide the points where rivers start behind some mountains to look like they're coming down from them or from inside them or something.

(part1.jpg)

After that we'll just color the land masses with the lightest green you can see on my maps and the seas with the lightest blue you can see on my maps (the one closest to land). After that make a new layer named graphics. For graphics you can scavenge pretty much anything. I generally just scavenge my old maps.

Sometimes I do get new graphics from Cradle of Dominion and sometimes I just might cut a part of a mountain range and add it into an another mountain range to make some newer looking mountain ranges, but for this map I'll just copy paste crap from Riverlands on the new layer to be quick. Try to not go too overboard with features though, as maps with too much special terrain make armies move really slow. Also, in wraparounds you don't want to add mountains or swamp close to edges. I generally colour the land under them and doing that over the wrap edge can be painful.

(For current progress, check part2.jpg)

Now it's the time for borders. For that you can use brush or pencil tool, whatever you wish. I use 255,0,0 red (= pure red) at 30% transparency and Circle 3 for borders and I draw my borders by free hand apart from the seas. As I promised to not use the ghetto method for the borders I'll use the complicated and painful method.

That means creating a new image with let's say 300 pixels more space in each direction. In this case, 900x1100. That means a 150 pixel border around the original map if we plan the original one middle. The idea is to do exactly that. First I combine the layers of our original map and use a GIMP tool to colorize the image to some strange color (in Finnish version Värit -> Väritä from the menus, meaning roughly something like Colors -> Colourize). Then I copy and paste the colorized image to work as the 150 pixel borders of the new image. First image is pasted so that you see 150 bottom pixels only and that there's 150 pixels of empty space on both sides. After that it should be easy to copy paste the image 7 more times (4 corners and 3 sides like this). At last, paste the original map in the middle. After that you'll want to press Control+Z = undo a few times on the original map to cancel combining layers and colouring the map.

(See part3.jpg for the temporary border drawing map)

Next you'll make a new border layer on both images and draw borders on the one with the strange colorized crap. Don't worry about drawing on the colored area - you are supposed to do that. I'd draw bottom and right sides of the map first apart from those parts of those areas that are in contact with the top and left edges. Once I've done that I'd just copy paste the borders from the colored area to the opposite sides so that I'd have nicely wrapping borders on top and left too. Once you're done with the borders, just copy paste the 600x800 pixels of the border layer from the middle to the original map's border layer and you'll have your borders done. Personally I skip doing sea borders at this time and add them with the same method used for making wrapping land mass. This'll probably result in some weird borders.

Now we just need to add province dots and finalize the terrain layer. Firstly we'll colourize the seas. That's done by using magic wand tool to select a sea area, then using color picker to pick the second lightest blue I've used for water in the earlier maps (obviously the one second closest to the shore). After that the third menu option from the left, Valitse in Finnish and probably something like Select in English, and Pienennä, which is something like shrink. Set it to 3 pixels and press ok. Now fill the remaining selection with the color. Do this until you've used all the colors and repeat until you've done it for all sea areas. If you have water areas that end to the edges of the map you'll see that this method considers borders of the maps as shores too. It might be visually tolerable in a non-wraparound, but as we're making a wraparound, just color the non-shore shore with the darkest blue.

Next up: darker green for swamps, brown for mountains and stuff like that. Use magic wand to select a continent (if you don't, you'll draw over the shores and it'll get ugly around shores), set up a brush tool (the one with brush as image!) with a brush called "Circle Fuzzy". Scale it up until it's bearably large and just color whatever you want to color. Repeat for all continents and islands with all colors.

Once that's done, the final part. Make a new layer called provinces and plant a 1x1 spot of pure white to every single province with the pencil tool. Brush tool is awful for this as it will possibly antialias your province spot. Also, be very damn careful, as if you accidentally plant two dots in the same province, removing the excess province will be really painful if you notice it only after you've made the province connections.

Save the map as .tga, don't use RLE-packaging. Open it in the Dom3 map maker (or Ballbarian's Map forge I guess?) and do the tricks.

The .zip file includes the GIMP .xcf imge file, you can find more .xcf files of mine from I personally won't link to Dominions 3 content made by me any more and I hope no-one else will either (old links are fine, whatever). You should be able to find them or most of them by asking on IRC or googling the other forums

Total time this took was like 2 hours.