[HN Gopher] Fantasy Map Brushes
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Fantasy Map Brushes
Author : starkparker
Score : 330 points
Date : 2023-12-21 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kmalexander.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kmalexander.com)
| livrem wrote:
| Looks like five new sets added since last time I visited that
| site a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder! Should get back to
| using a RSS reader to not miss updates from sites like that.
|
| Last time I tried it seemed to work quite well to import the
| Photoshop-brushes into Krita. I do not remember if it had built-
| in support for that or if there were extra steps, but a quick
| search shows there are several tutorials available on how to do
| it anyway. On the other hand the terrain images extracted from
| those maps are quite useful also as just images to copy-paste
| without setting up fancy brushes.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Feedly's fine for RSS btw
| gnatolf wrote:
| I mostly agree.
|
| Every time they add a new feature (none of those have ever
| been useful to me) I am afraid they're going to take it
| further from what I use it for. Which is only RSS feed
| reader.
|
| To their credit - if you ignore all the little additions, the
| base functionality is remarkably identical over the last
| decade or so.
| perforator wrote:
| Looks amazing! What would be the best way for someone to start
| making maps with these with no prior experience?
| sgbeal wrote:
| > with no prior experience?
|
| Grab the PNG bundles and copy/paste those into your graphics
| editor of choice.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Oh that I had time... I really wish I had the time to make a
| web-based map-drawing tool that would already know how to
| access all of these amazing CC0 and Public Domain assets...
|
| Seriously, honestly, if I were a billionaire, I'd be a patron
| of the arts like this, all the time, hiring people who want
| to make tools like this.
|
| /sigh/
| johngossman wrote:
| I have this bookmarked. I'm not sure if any of them meet
| your criteria, but...
|
| https://blog.reedsy.com/fantasy-map-generators/
|
| 15-year old me would probably fail out of school playing
| with these
| catapart wrote:
| Real question: What features do you think would be
| necessary for an MVP of what you're wanting built?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| It's hard to not take the M in MVP too seriously...
|
| But I have to take it seriously...
|
| I've broken into MVP 1, MVP 2, etc..
|
| * I suspect HTML5 Canvas is the easiest tool that would
| get the job done - I mention this because in my mind, I
| know the limitations of Canvas, and I think they line up
| quite while with what I'm imagining. It's possible
| something else could be easier to start with, but might
| not be able to easily implement ALL of these features
| I've laid out... But I think it's possible to get started
| with just CSS. [1]
|
| * An open source and easily appended list of tile
| families and their descriptors (size of tiles, positions
| of them, etc.) and the link to their licensing
|
| * Let you pick a tile family
|
| * Let you select a tile as your current brush - every
| click places a tile
|
| ---
|
| * Select an eraser that deletes tiles that you click
| within
|
| * Pick the background to use (such as parchment [respect
| their licensing, too], or just solid colors)
|
| * Select a tool to move existing tiles by clicking within
| them, dragging them
|
| ---
|
| * A way to filter tile families (and backgrounds) by
| licensing ("show me only CC0", "show CC0 or CCBY3.0
| etc.")
|
| * change the size of your image map
|
| * image map can be bigger than your browser window (with
| scrolling)
|
| ---
|
| * Change the size of the tiles you are about to paint
|
| * Change the color of the tiles you are about to paint
|
| * Change the opacity of the tiles you are about to paint
|
| * Change the rotation of the tiles you are about to paint
|
| ---
|
| * Pick a font, size, color, bold, italic
|
| * Type text
|
| * The Eraser can delete text
|
| * The Mover can move text
|
| ---
|
| * The Eraser can also drag through things to erase them
|
| * Turn on and off a grid to snap tiles to
|
| * Save as JSON button (x, y, tile id)
|
| * Load from JSON button
|
| * Save as Image button (otherwise people can use a screen
| scraper themselves)
|
| * The image is a PNG which has the JSON encoded in it as
| EXIF so it's easy to restore and continue
|
| [1] : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13526712/make-
| div-dragga...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Or you could stop tooling and optimizing, have some fun
| with a nice thing someone already made.
| catapart wrote:
| Right on. So it seems like you want a tilemap editor that
| includes a lot of assets from permissively licensed
| content?
|
| That's a bit of a taller order than the first glance
| because you would necessarily need to split the free
| packages into tiles. Feels like the better move would be
| for someone to just make tilesets of these brushes, and
| then just use an already-existing tilemap editor for the
| rest of the functionality.
|
| But if it's worth anything, I agree that both a simple
| map editor using the brushes for blitting onto a canvas,
| and a tilemap editor that defaults to these permissively
| licensed assets should be pretty easy to put together.
| The former is more aligned with things I'm already
| working on, which is why I asked.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember reading Paul Kidby's intro, to one of his Terry
| Pratchett graphic novels, where he talked about working with
| Sir Terry, in developing Discworld maps.
|
| Pratchett was a geologist, by training. That meant he was
| pretty demanding, as to the realism of the maps _(of a giant
| disc, on the back of four elephants, on the back of a giant
| turtle)_.
|
| He mentioned being corrected for not having rain shadows, for
| example.
|
| Making realistic fantasy maps is a bit more involved than one
| might think.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Related: https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-
| messed-u...
| digging wrote:
| God, yes. I remember when I had a lot more free time in high
| school and college and was doing a lot of world building for
| D&D campaigns I had not the skill to actually run. I learned
| so much about geology, geography, hydrology... just to make a
| map I wouldn't even finish, let alone use. Extremely fun
| though!
| whartung wrote:
| There are lots of examples on YouTube. Naturally, they make
| this all look easy! And, it seems to me, that it can be,
| indeed, "simple", but I wouldn't call it "easy".
|
| It's just a bunch of techniques. Follow some of those, make
| some throw away maps, and I bet you can get the hang of it.
| starkparker wrote:
| The linked #NoBadMaps blog post describes some of this, but
| ultimately there's very little to it:
| https://kmalexander.com/2019/02/27/nobadmaps/
|
| > Using my brushes is easy: you load them in Photoshop, create
| a document, and place what you want where you want it with a
| few mouse clicks. Point-and-click. There's very little drawing,
| no scanning, nothing complicated. In fact using any of my brush
| sets you can make super cool maps in minutes. That's
| intentional.
|
| The best way to get started is to just grab a piece of paper,
| scribble a weird shape on it, and sketch on it where you think
| certain features go. Everything after that is an implementation
| detail that tools like these brushes help to solve.
|
| If you've never made maps in any tool that applies symbols or
| uses "brushes" like this, play around with something like
| Inkarnate[1] or Wonderdraft[2] first. It's a web tool for
| fantasy mapping with a basic free version and similar palette
| of brush-like features that you can paint onto maps, but strips
| down a lot of the non-mapping tooling and interface that you'd
| wade through in something like Photoshop or GIMP.
|
| Inkarnate should help give you a hands-on idea of what's
| possible, and it might be all you want or need out of the
| process (in which case its "pro" subscription is about
| $25/year). If you want more flexibility or power after playing
| around with it, then it's a matter of learning related features
| in the tool you have or want to use - looking up tutorials on
| Photoshop brushes, custom brushes in GIMP, brushes and bundles
| in Krita, etc.
|
| They all work just differently enough to not have a blanket
| recommendation. These brush packs are in the somewhat well-
| supported ABR format, but each tool that supports them also has
| different features for configuring how they're applied. The
| packs are also available as piles of PNG images that you can
| place manually or make into brushes yourself, if you're so
| motivated.
|
| Once you get a feel for "painting" symbols as brushes, it's
| mostly up to you how you apply them. You might like to draw the
| outlines of landmasses and bodies of water on paper, scan them,
| and then apply the features with the brushes. For instance,
| when I was starting out with mapping I followed Jonathan
| Roberts's blog[3], which steps through and explains a lot of
| his process for different types of maps and mapping features
| from a very basic level of understanding. Each brush set here
| also includes an "in use" section that links to other brushes
| the artist used to apply certain effects, like watercolors and
| textures, in the sample maps.
|
| Maybe you prefer to draw the landmasses in the same tool that
| you're using the brushes, or maybe you're more comfortable in a
| different drawing tool. (Some people even use GIS tools to draw
| maps in a data format transformable to different projections,
| but that's not a great starting point.) Maybe you'd even prefer
| to use a random landmass generator to skip the drawing step
| entirely.
|
| The brushes ultimately exist to save you the tedium of filling
| in those spaces with repetitive shapes like mountains, tress,
| buildings, etc., that are all slightly different each time
| while also maintaining a consistent aesthetic style across the
| map.
|
| [1]: https://inkarnate.com/
|
| [2]: https://www.wonderdraft.net/
|
| [3]: http://www.fantasticmaps.com/
| g5095 wrote:
| DMs rejoice
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Guilty pleasure.
|
| Whenever I DM a campaign I spend a significantly high
| percentage of my time preparing on making maps when I should be
| planning encounters...
|
| Map making and world building are fun.
| johngossman wrote:
| Amidst so much dreck on the Internet, I like to cherish such
| gems.
| account-5 wrote:
| This is excellent. I love(d) fantasy books maps. I loved trying
| to track where the characters were in the world's I was reading
| about. I used to draw my own for the books I was going to write,
| unfortunately my talents lay with drawing rather than writing...
| JackFr wrote:
| > darwing rather than writing...
|
| Indeed! :-)
| account-5 wrote:
| Unfortunately my phone only corrects properly spelled words
| and leaves obviously incorrect words as is. But certainly an
| ironic and suitable mistake!
| nonethewiser wrote:
| How would one use these brush sets?
| whartung wrote:
| I have not looked at these specifically, but can give a simple
| example.
|
| You're probably familiar with how the maps look in Lord of the
| Rings.
|
| If you notice, the mountains have a look to them, a schematic
| representation of essentially triangles, perhaps done with a
| fine brush. It's not just two straight lines in a corner.
|
| So, anyway, one of the brushes in these sets might be those
| mountain icons.
|
| Then, when making your mountain range on your map, you select
| the "mountain top brush", and then "stamp" mountains in an area
| using the glyph. So, in that sense, it's not a "brush" per se,
| something that you actually use for brush strokes. Rather, its
| an iconography that you can place on your map.
|
| That's a trivial example of how these can be used. They may
| well be more sophisticated than that.
| ornornor wrote:
| So it's really more like a physical rubber stamp of sorts
| that you can scale up or down but that will otherwise always
| look the same?
|
| I also know very little about this and the "brush"
| denomination really confuses me.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Reading a bit more, I think "brush" is being used in the
| context of photoshop. Sounds like its a specific feature
| there.
| crtified wrote:
| In traditional painting, since hundreds or thousands of
| years ago, many drawing techniques relied heavily upon
| using different physical brushes. The properties of each
| different brush would make certain tasks easier for the
| painter.
|
| In more modern times, as computer-based drawing evolved,
| that same principle became a basic feature of drawing
| applications - that is, the ability to change between
| different (virtual) 'brushes', each with different
| characteristics, such as shape, but also intensity and
| other factors which make the artist's job both easier and
| more nuanced.
|
| In a way, your reduction of the idea to "a set of rubber
| stamps of sorts" is true, in the same way that a physical
| brush is equally "a stamp of sorts", if the artist chooses
| to use that brush in a suitably monotonous stamping action.
| But in digital art (as in physical art) the total picture
| is more about the skilful wielding of myriad tools and
| techniques, through multiple steps and recombinations.
|
| To bring in another analogy - every wood worker uses
| basically the same tools, the basic claw hammer shape
| hasn't changed in a long time, the basic screw drivers,
| drill bits, etc. The same set of rubber stamps, in a way.
| Is that a constraint upon creativity and uniqueness?
| Perhaps, but not meaningfully.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| GIMP or Photoshop. The "brush" here refers to the brush tool.
| Basically vector icons meant for painting.
| genezeta wrote:
| Adding to the other answers, there are also -besides Photoshop,
| Gimp, etc- specialized tools to draw fantasy maps. The site
| mentions Wonderdraft [0], but there are a bunch of others
| though not all of them support using external brushes.
|
| Some other tools in this space may be Watabou's tools [1],
| Azgaar's tools [2], Inkarnate [3], Mapforge [4], or quite a few
| more which you can find links to in this list [5]. Again: you
| could use these brushes with _some_ of these; not all support
| external brushes.
|
| [0] https://www.wonderdraft.net/
|
| [1] https://watabou.github.io/
|
| [2] https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
|
| [3] https://inkarnate.com/
|
| [4] https://www.mapforge-software.com/
|
| [5] https://www.mapforge-software.com/links-to-map-making-apps/
| aaroninsf wrote:
| TIL in the context of tools for image editors like gimp, "brush
| set" is the term of art for "glyph set."
|
| I suppose you could "paint" with these but the intended use is
| "single-click stamping."
|
| Lovely work, reflective of both craft care and affection--but boy
| I do wish another term had been adopted :P
| takk309 wrote:
| I am kinda excited to integrate some of these sets into a real
| location map built in ArcGIS! It may not result in a spatially
| perfect map, but it will be way more fun to build and look at. I
| can see a good use case for public engagement type maps.
| xipho wrote:
| Here Dragons Abound is another hidden gem in this vein:
| https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
| programd wrote:
| Indeed. The Here Dragons Abound author's blog post on the
| overhead of maintaining this very cool open source project for
| the benefit of others [0] is rather eye opening. This is a
| blueprint for what it takes to do it correctly, often for very
| little reward.
|
| Also, apparently he is a contributor to Nethack.
|
| [0] https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2022/06/map-
| compasses...
| fingerlocks wrote:
| K.M. is probably the best designer I've ever had the pleasure of
| working with in 20 years. Great to see this on HN!
| noxa wrote:
| beautiful - also recommend his novels:
| https://kmalexander.com/home/
| mhd wrote:
| Yeah, I read the first one a while ago and really enjoyed the
| world building. Guess someone who's really into mapping won't
| disappoint on that front.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've seen this headline most of the day, but just now properly
| looked at the link. These are very nice, and not really sure what
| I was expecting, but they are much better than I anticipated. The
| internet still has pockets of cool things if you're willing to
| take off your floaties of siloed social platforms and venture
| into the deeper waters
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