How do we make maps?

[Strela]

Compass Rose sent me an email today and asked how we make maps (based upon a comment I made in the colourisation thread).

Map making is simple but very time consuming.

The good news is that John Tiller has given us the tools to do the job pretty efficiently.

The first thing is to find an appropriate map.

There are so many map archives on the web these days we can usually find the correct period maps we need.

Once we have a source map we resize it. With four hexes being a kilometre in Panzer Battles we resize the map so that a kilometre is equivalent to the number of pixels in four hexes.

Now the fun bit starts. The editor allows us to place our source map in 'overlay'. This allows us to see the source map and 'draw' over it. With the press of the space bar we can hide the source map and see our handwork.

Here is an example of a source map with the roads and stream/gullies already done;





Here we can see the finished map after clicking  the space bar;






In a number of cases we can't get good enough typography maps. Fortunately Google now comes to our rescue and has a view with elevations. It's perfect as it shows 20 metre variations which is optimal for Panzer Battles. As this is a modern map, roads and built up areas will be larger than during the war, so we still need the source basic maps to layout a lot of the details.

Here is a source map built off Google maps. Also note that you can see the various elevation levels, within the editor;






And here are the contours that were created from the source Google map.






I always start with the contour map first and then add all the detail afterwards. It can take days to do a large map as you have to do multiple passes of the map to get all the details in.

That's the 5 minute tutorial....

David