29 January 2008

How it's made: my map elements with Inkscape

I imagine such a preamble is not very inviting, but it is the preamble of the latest article from my tutorials website:

map elementsIt's been a while since I wrote a tutorial (in fact quite a while, as "wrote" != "published") and that was for good reason: I was not able to come with a tutorial fitting the rest of my my tutorial site and did not want to break the tradition . So it was a hard decision to write this piece, which comes as a conclusion to my quest to create a RPG tileset of over 50 clipart images, a decision I made mostly because I already was asked about how I made the images and expect even more questions in the future.


It is not really a tutorial, more a "how it's made" for my map tileset (available also from the Open CLip Art Library), it describe the process I used in creating those images, a very short sketch of the workflow (described in more detail in the article) is like this:
[workflow]
[read more]


Of course, there is available as usual a Romanian translation.

And now I can really consider this topic closed.

17 comments:

  1. Those are awesome ! Please make more of them, with the upcoming 0.47 version, you'll go even faster to make the initial cube.

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  2. Yup, using angled guides. Unfortunately, we don't have recent autopackage builds, I have an older build from the development tree without this feature.

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  3. 3D box + object to (angled) guides is really what i meant. What would be nice now is the ability to duplicate guides by drag & drop+ space like for shapes.

    On which platform are you running ? I have fresh svn binaries for WIN32 if you wish.

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  4. Hum, looks like you're running a better system than mine.
    This make me think about rendering real http://openstreetmap.org maps using your set. Not sure if this will be readable but should be fun.

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  5. Dear Nicu,
    that's truely some awfu... ahem awesome work, thx for contributing thsoe! I always missed some of them *g
    Gonna replay the tutorial later today, appreciation for sharing!!
    Seeing as you are really a great grafx artist, I'd really hear your opinion on this website http://hfopi.org and would highly appreciate if you could work together with me, at least on the graphics stuff, f.e. the logo needs some 3D fixes...
    cheers ;)

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  6. empee, unfortunately, I don't know to work on 3D stuff... this is something I always wanted to learn (Blender) but didn't get the time for.
    Hat can I say about your website? It has a very "futuristic" look, not bad. But at the first sight I very hard for the to tell what is the website about. Maybe is a good idea to work on that.

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  7. Once again, awesome artwork and an awesome tutorial nicu!

    BTW, the most recent autopackage builds have been working for me on Fedora 8.

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  8. nicu: that's the smallest issue of all though.. we will need a lot of material in the future and also contributors in general so we'd definitly appreciate your engagement. And imho the name does state pretty clearly what the project is about, future optimization ;)

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  9. ryan, the latest package available on http://inkscape.modevia.com/ap/?M=D is very old, from November, and I believe it work only on Ubuntu, not on Fedora, Suse, Slackware, etc.
    There is no autopackage build for pre0 - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438&package_id=99112

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  10. i downloaded inkscape20080119rev17138AOCV.package
    today from http://inkscape.modevia.com/ap/?M=D

    on a fresh install of fedora 8.

    and i only had to solve 2 dependency issues to get it working:

    i just installed
    python-lxml
    gc-devel
    via yum. and it works great...

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  11. Wow! My bad... I was used with the files sorted alphabetically and looked only at the bottom of the page...

    Thanks Ryan!

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  12. Thank you, very interesting!

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  13. When you first draw the building, all the faces are filled. How did you do?

    When I do the contour they are not filled... Could you help me just for this step?

    Your map elements are all great!

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  14. I draw the contour with open polygons (beziers) and no fill.
    I add color fill in a much later step, with closed polygons which have a fill color (and they are filled the normal way: draw a polygon and then select a fill color).

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  15. Thanks a lot for your explanations!

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  16. thx for this tutorial, what a great! i used this tutorial to find out about how to make RPG maps. so, thx for all..

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  17. Appreciate the recommendation. Let me try it out.

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