I'll do another Twitch Stream tonight. I'll be working on the Atlas Pages and my Campaign Map and hopefully also a bit of Oerth continent layout. 

My intention is to make this be a bit less of a technical Live Stream and a bit more about the content of my Greyhawk maps. Where we end up will of course largely be up to questions and things you guys and the Twitch viewers want me to talk about.

Adventurer and Cartographer Tier Patreon members will be notified on how to get on the live stream using Zoom, here on my Patreon Page and in Discord.

A new Zoom session for Cartographer Tier Patreons will be on Thursday at 6pm PDT.

See you tonight! 

Back home from a hectic and great time at Gary Con, seeing friends and lots of fellow gamers is always a treat. An unusual nasty case of some sort of Con Crud kept me occupied for a while but now I’m up and running again, both literary and with my mapping.

After several years trying to figure out the best way to map Greyhawk at a high resolution in full 3D I did a series of Shield Lands maps for my campaign with the resolution of 5ft per pixel. They look great and work fantastic for everything from large overview to battle maps, the problem was that the workflow relied on using tiling to cover large areas. With a few tweaks I managed to overcome the flaws it introduced. Then came the dreaded problems of memory issues and crashes reimporting the tiles, and I had to rethink how to do things. After two years of trying all sorts of ways around the problem I’m now fairly certain of how to best proceed forward.

To avoid tiling and rendering limits I have switched to using a resolution of 100 feet per pixel, and a 16K render area, covering a bit over 150 x 150 miles. This gives me enough detail to work with for local more detailed maps, avoid using tiles. This also gives me enough room to create those large area elevation changes that are devilishly difficult to capture well using small areas. It also gives me a decent control of drainage (lakes and rivers) on a continental scale.

I’m relying on my trusted tool World Machine 3, which despite its age still reigns supreme among terrain creation tools. It has real world measurements, the best previews, and the most stable. I will use WM4 for texturing and corrections and be ready to move even the terrain creation to WM4 when (or if) it becomes good enough.

I will work on this tonight on my Twitch livestream at 6pm PDT at: https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer

I’ll make a long post about this soon, explaining both the workflow and my terrain choice.

My sources project has just reached a first milestone, all the country names are entered with references, 119 of them. Next up are provinces and local names concluding the political labels, which I hope to have done in a week or so. Two big groups of labels left, geographic ones (oceans, lakes, river, highlands and more), and all the settlements. This will take some time, but my goal is to have it all done by summer.

You can find it here: https://annabmeyer.notion.site/19e0da32cbe6806a922ee8a3e80dd169?v=19e0da32cbe6803b824c000cc8429cc1

When all the labels from my public map are entered it is time to overhaul my website, notion site and online presence in general. It is a bit of a mess now, especially the way my content is organized. Things need to be a lot easier to find and download. I have ideas and plans which will be tested leading up to the overhaul this summer.

I will be playing in an ACLU fundraiser game with the awesome Guild Superior members, tomorrow 6-9pm CDT. Donation link: https://tilt.fyi/C67PUhClUe

Please join us and support a VERY urgent cause and have fun doing it!

It took me a long time, but finally a long time favorite is back!
The bite size printer friendly version of my Flanaess map is back, this time in 11x17 inch format.

The 11x17 format required 70 pages to effectively cover the whole Flanaess. There are some overlap on each page to make them more useful.  Below is the page layout.

Most of the pages are in a grid but I added a few extra pages to cover the leftovers, and create a better coverage of areas that got fragmented otherwise.

Each page comes in JPG and PDF format. The JPG has a 0.25 inch bleed added to cover prints that needs it. The PDF version are better liked by some prit services who have problems with pixel ratios and similar problems with JPG's. This way I hope I have covered most bases. 

Here is an example of the area covered by a page. The inner green rectangle is the area exclusive to this page. The orange area is the 11x17 page border, so the area between green and orange are the overlap between pages. The pink is the bleed area added to the JPG.

Each page comes with a Mini Map, small licensing info, scales and a page number and guide to adjacent pages.

So far I have done the nine pages surrounding the City of Greyhawk and you can find them here: http://bit.ly/GH-FlanaessAtlas-598CY-2019

I will create more on my Mapping Live Twitch Stream tonight at 6pm PDT!
Please come and join me at:  https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer 

Thank you so much guys for joining my Patreon. Your support means so much for me giving me the chance to devote half my working time on my passion, mapping the Greyhawk setting!

Time to re-start my Twitch Map Live Streams, and the first will be Tuesday March 26th @6pm PST.

https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer
Topics will be Lendore Mapping in World Machine, New Icons and a first look at Gaea and the latest World Machine Dev Update.

Welcome to some live mapping and Q&A!

Here comes a Flanaess map for Photoshop, It has 41 layers with text and symbols on different layers, as well as terrain both with and without hexes. This file is way too large to use the standard PSD format, instead it is using the PSB format, which is the special format for very large files. Few applications besides Adobe Photoshop are able to open it.

This will be the base file for a number of variants of the 2019 Edition, area maps, DM - Player versions, handout maps, spread maps and more. These variants will use more common file formats like PSD, JPG and PNG.

Work on these different maps will be an ongoing effort the coming months.

You can download the 7.42 GB large file here: http://bit.ly/GH-FlanaessFull598CY-PSB-2019