Looks amazing! What would be the best way for someone to start making maps with these with no prior experience?
Looks amazing! What would be the best way for someone to start making maps with these with no prior experience?
How would one use these brush sets?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you, this helped.
Reading a bit more, I think “brush” is being used in the context of photoshop. Sounds like its a specific feature there.
GIMP or Photoshop. The "brush" here refers to the brush tool. Basically vector icons meant for painting.
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/
[4] https://www.mapforge-software.com/
[5] https://www.mapforge-software.com/links-to-map-making-apps/
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.
Feedly’s fine for RSS btw
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.
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
On the other hand, this site is near the top of a link aggregator where you are seeing it for the first time.
are you comparing a link aggregator to a walled garden of a social media platform? link aggregators are pretty much the last vestiges of the old internet. only, now, we get to comment about the links as well.
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...
darwing rather than writing...
Indeed! :-)
Unfortunately my phone only corrects properly spelled words and leaves obviously incorrect words as is. But certainly an ironic and suitable mistake!
Here Dragons Abound is another hidden gem in this vein: https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/
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...
beautiful - also recommend his novels: https://kmalexander.com/home/
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.
Amidst so much dreck on the Internet, I like to cherish such gems.
I guess this is a gem in large part because it is free and high quality work.
I wish there was a way to demonetize the internet a bit; or to provide easier access to places that don’t always try to sell you something.
DMs rejoice
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.
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.
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!
Un/semi related I guess, but I've always found it pretty interesting how brushes are considered artistic, use of PS clone etc tools that "do the job for you" are still considered artistic. But use of SD etc is not artistic at all.
Even faced with the idea of a model trained only on properly sourced works/even only generic photos of the real world, most people _still_ seem to balk at calling it art, or the person who uses such a model an "artist". That's some gatekeeping right there.
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
Grab the PNG bundles and copy/paste those into your graphics editor of choice.
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/
Real question: What features do you think would be necessary for an MVP of what you're wanting built?
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...
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.
Or you could stop tooling and optimizing, have some fun with a nice thing someone already made.
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
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.
Related: https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...
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!
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.
The linked #NoBadMaps blog post describes some of this, but ultimately there's very little to it: https://kmalexander.com/2019/02/27/nobadmaps/
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/