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Much improved Vintyri fills now available
As the first freezing temperatures approach here in Northern Bavaria, our project group has given up on extending the summer vacation farther and is back at work producing cartographic and RPG material. Our first new free and open release is a new Version 2.0 of the Vintyri (TM) Textures & Fills. This is a substantially improved follow-up to the sets of overland and settlement raster fills for FM8 which were offered here first as a Dungeons Daring (TM) and later as an expanded Vintyri set of fills. Version 2.0 replaces the Dungeons Daring fills and the Vintyri Fills & Textures in Versions 1.0 and 1.1. It extends the set with a few new fills, but above all, it presents the original fills in much improved quality. The seed graphics for the original fills were digital photos made by our group and public domain photos from governmental agencies. After a lot of manipulation with GIMP, we had turned them into serviceable albeit somewhat less than perfect fills. Recently, Carl Nielsen of our project group redid almost all of the fills, this time running the GIMP-manipulated graphics through a program that only recently came to our attention called ImageSynth (R), which makes excellent tiles for mapping. This new version eliminates the tiling patterns and the problematical redundancy that were in the earlier fills, so that they now will spread smoothly across your FM8 maps. This new and considerably improved release includes 80 fills in the overland category, 14 in the settlements category and 11 in the structures category. In the main overland group there are, among many other things, fills for grasslands, mountains, deserts, prairies, swamps, tundra, snow-covered terrain, waterways, etc. A 20-page PDF - also free and open - accompanies the new release. It includes color catalogs for all of the new fills. The remaining material is identical to that in the PDF for Versions 1.0 and 1.1. The PDF also includes installation instructions. You can download the fills and the PDF free at:
http://www.vintyri.com
Please note: Installing the new version will not delete the old fills. If you want only the new fills, erase the old folders Vintyri Overland, Vintyri Settlements and Vintyri Structures first. If you want both sets, we suggest that you rename these three older folders before installing the new fills. That will help you avoid a lot of confusion later,
http://www.vintyri.com
Please note: Installing the new version will not delete the old fills. If you want only the new fills, erase the old folders Vintyri Overland, Vintyri Settlements and Vintyri Structures first. If you want both sets, we suggest that you rename these three older folders before installing the new fills. That will help you avoid a lot of confusion later,
Comments
Quick suggestion for additional content: have you considered making overland fills of structures? That is, fills that show top down views of cities, towns, etc. I recently put together a town using fractal mapper and placing the buildings not only took a long time, but it also made the file enormous. Making a city in this manner just doesn't seem possible. A few fill patterns that were top down shots of buildings could potentially be extremely useful for this type of application. One could use fills to make generic sectors of a city and then save symbols for the key features.
Thanks again for the great content!
And yes, you're right, using individual raster symbols is slow and takes a lot of memory. However, FM8 runs fast and well with such symbols in such settings if you run it on a modern Dual Core Quad PC with Windows 7 and 8 GB memory.
I haven't had any problems with FM8's speed, even on my old laptop. (Although it's refreshing to hear that I should see good results from the new laptop I have on order.) In my post above, I was mostly referring to the time it takes to place individual buildings and the size of the file when one's finished.
I made the following town map using raster symbols (almost entirely vintyri symbols):
That town map above actually took me a lot longer to make than the overland map below:
The big difference in time was based on the use of fills, rather than a reliance on individual symbols. This was really the basis of my suggestion. If I was making a larger city, a fill containing top down shots of multiple buildings would be incredibly useful to quickly fill city sectors with buildings.
At any rate, glad to hear you've got lots more in the works. I've really appreciated everything you've created so far and I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming down the line.
Good work. Suggestion: You might want to play around a bit more with the water. The current bevel makes the water look to me like it's raised rather than depressed. You also might want to try a feathering under the blur option.
More good work!
The basic idea is good, but the result would be less satisfying. As a fill, it would cut off randomly wherever the fill happens to end. The result often would be that buildings on the perimeter of the fill could be cut off in the middle.
The reason that we're looking at possible vector symbols for maps of larger areas is file size. Making a city map with 500 raster symbols of buildings would drain resources to such an extent that some PCs wouldn't be able to handle the file.
With a vector symbol set, we could offer groups of roadside symbols that include a series of generic buildings which could be placed next to streets and roads, accomplishing the goal you want to reach without cutting structures off in the middle and without stretching PC resources.
This would not mean, however, that one has to give up raster mapping of such cities. Most non-structural elements of the map still would be raster fills and symbols. Only the structure and grouped city block symbols would be vector symbols. Because of their diminutive size on the map, their vector character would not cause a visual conflict.
FM8 offers some interesting possibiities for such a system that are not available in any other cartographic program that I know. My colleague Trevor Cooke in Edinburgh and I are doing quite a bit of experimenting with this right now. If we like our end result, we'll go with it and also include a lot of detail on how to work with it in the tutorial that we're writing.
I love quoting myself!
Since this last posting, I've contacted Trevor Cooke by E-Mail, and we've decided that there's no reason not to go public with our experiments. Therefore, download this file (a mere 2 KB):
http://www.vintyri.com/group.zip
Unzip it into an FM8 symbol catalog.
Make a map maybe 1,000 or 2,000 feet wide, and stamp this symbol onto it at several locations. Then zoom in close on a single building. See what you think.
We call these rasterized vector symbols.
It would be foolish for anyone to think that we have tested them thoroughly. They may make many problems that we haven't discovered yet. Let us know how this works (if at all) for you.
To use this test group symbol, note the following:
1. It will work only if you already have installed the Vintyri Symbol Set 1 according to instructions. If you've installed these symbols in a different folder than the default, this symbol won't work.
2. Unlike ordinary vector symbols, you cannot change colors with these hybrid symbols.
My Symbol Set is entitled 'Vintyri Collections' and my Category is titled 'Walls, Gates and Towers' which contains all of symbol set 1. What's the default supposed to be?
Oh, and thank you for the feathering tip. That worked quite well. The other thing I was going to do was play with the subtraction so I could get the ground on top and bevel that.
You also need to install Symbol Set 2.
Right now for symbol set 2 I have:
Base Buildings Clay Brown
Base Buildings Light Brown
Base Buildings Slate
Base Buildings Wood Shingle
Buildings Clay Brown
Buildings Light Brown
Buildings Slate
Buildings Wood Shingle
External Objects
Parts for Structures
Vector Location Markers