Here’s a little preview of the upcoming July annual by Pär Lindström. Check out his nice black and white style.
You can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2013 here.
We’ve just released the June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013. Check out the Comic Book look of this vector overland style.
This style has been inspired by the artwork of illustrator James Stowe.
It’s time for our monthly look at what great maps the ProFantasy user community has produced. Let’s see what everyone has come up with!
Joachim de Ravenbel is back with this beautiful battle map of Hanin’s Chapel.
KROM delights once more with his Dioramas models plus floorplans. See his Mausoleum and the Kothian Houses:
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The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013 is now available. It contains a set of symbols to highlight actions, points of interest or reference material on your maps, as well as a series of tutorials on how to create more vector symbols yourself.
Here is last month’s example map, with some of the this month’s symbols highlighting a military campaign.
We have released the April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013: The Midgard World overland style. Created in cooperation with Kobold Press and Jonathan Roberts, this style recreates the maps published in the Midgard fantasy campaign setting and the accompanying iPad atlas. You can now add your own regional maps for this setting, or recreate another world in the same mapping style.
Even better, the Midgard World style is compatible with the Jon Roberts overland style from the Annual Vol 5. They can be combined for a greatly enlarged variety of symbols and fill styles.
It’s time again to admire all the user maps that have popped up in the ProFantasy forum during the last four weeks.
Taking up a recent Annual issue (Pär Lindström’s regional style), Modric created this beauty of the Dwimmerheim region.
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We’ve just released the March Annual issue: Flavio’s Myrr Overland style is now available as a download for the Annual subscribers.
His beautiful and unique overland style is based on intricate bitmap texture and shaded contours, as you can see from this sample:
You can subscribe to the current Annual here.
[Ed: This is a map created by Rigtje Schootstra, Leviathus on the forum]
Hello everyone!
It’s world map time! These maps are from my project Lion Head. The world is called Eterna.
Below the first map, made with Campaign Cartographer 3 (using the Mercator Style), which is based on my hand drawn map (see below this map). The position of the continents is a bit different than my original drawing, but I had to fit them in the two spheres without shrinking the map too much. Most of the place names and political borders are still placeholders.
The map I drew in Photoshop. Here you can see the names of the continents more clearly.
Enjoy guys.
~Cheers! (Original post here)
[Ed’s Note: Let us know if you like this style, and with Flavio’s permission, we’ll create an Annual from it]
My fiancée recently asked me if it would be OK to make a Viking character for my Al-Qadim campaign. I thought about the role playing possibilities for a moment: Viking gets lost at sea en route to pillage and plunder; Viking gets shipwrecked in hostile desert environment; Viking PC makes for a very interest game indeed. I then thought about where such a Viking would come from in my world and set about creating a map of his home.
Myrr is a semi-arctic region largely inspired by Scandinavia, Iceland, and Alaska. I spent a great deal of time looking over maps of their fjords and river systems in the hope that I could create something similar and believable in my own map. After an hour or two tinkering around with the fractal line tool (adding a river here, indenting land mass there, etc), I finally had a landmass and set of islands I could be happy with.
The next step was to create the mountain range. I first drew the main ridge of the mountain and all the little ridges that branch off of it with the smooth poly tool. This is what the looked like without effects on.
I gave it a rather long and dark wall shadow, a deep edge fade inner (with 75% inner opacity), and a large lighted bevel effect (so that the two sides of the bevel met in the center of the polygon). I then added a Mountain Hills sheet that encircled the range with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect. Next, I added a Mountain Base sheet that encircled the Mountain Hills (also with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect.) Because I wasn’t thoroughly happy with the colors that were coming out, I finalized it with a Mountain Cover sheet. This shows the details of the effects:
And this is the final mountain range:
As you can see, I also used the Mountain Base sheet to layout my hills. I further added a Hills Base sheet that encircle these hills and had a deep edge fade inner to give the illusion of height. From there I added some forests (very subtle), rivers, text, (about a dozen assorted sheets to get the ocean, landmass and desert looking right) and called it a day. All of the textures came from Herwin Wielink annual and CGtextures.com.
This map was a great deal of fun to make and I learned a new technique for mountains in the process. Of course, the best part is now crafting a history about this region to help fill in the gaps of my fiancée’s character’s back-story. Although I’m far from done, you can check what I have so far (along with a full resolution version of the map) at my blog.
We’ve gone into 2013 and our community shows no sign of letting up with the barrage of wonderful user maps. Here’s the roundup for January!
KenG was inspired by KROM’s wonderful close-up maps/paintings done in the Herwin Wielink overland style. The result is this beautiful local map.
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