Wow!! That is damn impressive. I find the sudden equities of my hand drawn on the fly maps...
I wish i had that level of Photoshop-fu and craft-do. Though i might give the maps from rise of the runelords a go, if I can figure out how to rescale them.
Bravo.
I'm another of one of those mad cartographes that will take the extra step and print off a scale map for certain encounters (essentially anything that will fit on the gaming table @ 1" scale).
They are always a hit, but your 3D model would be extra icing. How do you STORE that?
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What are the pillars made from? They look carved like plastic or maybe soap? lol
Further, what material did you use to strengthen the actual map so that it would stand on the pillars?
When it was all said and done, we printed it out on ~30 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper and cemented it onto foam board. We had envisioned making the columns look better... but we sadly ran out of time before the game so we had to hurry with a makeshift styrofoam solution!
Did you print the maps straight from the PDF, or did you work on them yourself? If you did them yourself, do you have the files available?
This is amazing looking! You can actually see and measure the elevation and setup the multi-tier encounter in the battle-market in all its perplexity! Awesome job, haven't seen anything this cool looking since all the models for 'The Wreck' in Savage Tide. This raises the bar on tabletop role-playing, and definitely inspires me to deal with more 3-D terrain.
(Which right now is a 3-D model of 'The Well of Debased Eros' from Savage Tide)
I especially love the bodies left in the PCs' wake. Carnage!
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Did you print the maps straight from the PDF, or did you work on them yourself? If you did them yourself, do you have the files available?
let's try this again, since my first post got eaten a few days ago
I did pretty much the same thing, save mine was 15 11x17 sheets and glued mine to cardboard. For pillars I used pvc pipe about 6-8" long. (was pretty tall, but wanted pc's to not have trouble seeing the map. (if anyone wants them message me)
Unfortunately, the were able to sneak in, and basically took the shortest route to the third floor only getting in one fight (the stair guards) thanks to the information and the key they got from undrella...
They loved the battle market, but since I didn't have much to work with it lasted just long enough for them to get through it. The pillars I used were starting to corkscrew by the time they made it to the third floor.
Of course it wasn't until after I had it set up that three/four of my players mentioned they could have gotten me better supplies from the factory they work at. Like corrugated plastic large enough for the whole table.
Incredible!
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Thanks everyone! Let me make one correction before my wife kills me... she's the DM of the game! We've been planning the Legacy of Fire campaign for a while though, so I'm kinda like an assistant before the games who just so happens to play as well :P
Anyways as to some question answering:
@Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop. The pictures don't show it but if you got really close you'd definitely see a grainy picture. However, for the purpose of standing at least 2 feet away while playing it looked pretty good.
@Jason, The best way to store it is to actually knock off the styrofoam inbetween the tiers, then they can simply be laid flat on top of each other. When we want to use it again it's just a simple matter of gluing the columns back on.
@Wes sadly that wasn't even all the carnage... as we had to reuse gnolls from the bottom floors for the upper tiers! The carnage was awesome though. Gotta love that Hurvank, he was a wonderful "ally."
Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop.
Okay, let me ask you a beginner question. When I try to grab the image from the PDF, I can't grab it as I can with some PDFs. There's nothing to click on. Did you use some program to do this? Or am I just PDF-impaired?
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Tarandor, we used the original file from the PDF but extracted and smoothed the picture using photoshop.Okay, let me ask you a beginner question. When I try to grab the image from the PDF, I can't grab it as I can with some PDFs. There's nothing to click on. Did you use some program to do this? Or am I just PDF-impaired?
It depends, what program are you using? I use Foxit Reader. In Foxit what I did is zoom in to about 200% then use the camera tool to select the whole page and copy it. Opened up Paint Shop Pro and paste. Then started dividing up the maps.
I know there's a camera tool in acrobat too, but as I don't have it on this computer I'm not positive if it can copy the whole page or just what's visable on screen.
Acrobat 9 won't let you select the image. You need to use Acrobat 8.
Thanks, Eric and DMFTodd!
So...
Once in Paint Shop Pro, what steps did you take to divide up the maps (should be the last question. I think I can take it from there!)
Never mind! I printed them out (that's a big stack of cardstock!) I'll post pictures when I finish it.
Would you care sharing your photoshoped map ?
when I have asked my family digital artist, she reply that the whole thing must be vectorized and that she Don't have a Week to do this for a game.
Kelmarane has Fallen !
and the 3D flipmat of the arena that this thread inspired me was more than useful.