Fun with openstreetmap.org - more maps than you can poke a stick at.

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Nobby-W

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openstreetmap.org is an open licensed alternative to google maps, and the content is available under an open licence as well. The fun part is that with a little convolution you can get the maps out as an (at least somewhat) editable SVG that can import into Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator.

You can get a tool called maperative (http://maperitive.net/) that will take osm files and export editable svgs. A more convoluted route involves importing into qgis (https://www.qgis.org).

The maps can be edited in Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape (just frigging with that now), allowing you to modify them. I'll be digging into that at some point soon.

In the meantime, here's a PDF map of central Tatouine (yes, that Tatouine) rendered through Inkscape.

https://www.rpgpub.com/resources/fun-with-openstreetmap-org.52/
 
Some commentary so far.

I can get the map into Adobe Illustrator and pick the streets out of it. Some are a bit messy - for example the central highway running through the town isn't a single object. However, it looks like tidying the map up and isolating the streets is possible. For some reason Adobe Illustrator imported the vector images the right way up and a whole load of bitmap tiles upside down. Definitely a few rough edges there.
 
Well, after a bit of frigging, I've got the first layer out and into something that can be used as the basis for a modified city map. The process consisted of loading the exported SVG into Illustrator, picking out the roads, and then setting widths appropriately. Then I used a couple of Illustrator's features (outline path and shape builder) to make the street plan in the linked illustration.

This map is about as complex as AI will handle; the shape builder was starting to herniate.

The next step will be the geographic features - the town sits in a dry river bed and is surrounded by badlands.

PDF export from this step here. https://www.rpgpub.com/resources/tatouine-step-1-get-the-streets-out.53/
 
I've gotten some of the terrain features across and put them into layers in an adobe illustrator file. Now the map is minimally useful and you can place points of interest such as docking bays or cantinas on it.

There is an exported SVG version (props to the mods for configuring the pub to allow SVG resources) at the link below. the SVG file should round trip into Illustrator and will import into inkscape, although it loses the layer information when you do. PM me if you want a copy of the illustrator (CS6) file.

Corel draw imported the SVG file but went away into the weeds when I tried to break it apart into editable objects.

https://www.rpgpub.com/resources/tatouine-step-2-get-some-features-on-the-map.54/
 
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Thoughts so far:

From an experiment with Tatouine, a town about the size of Tunbridge Wells with a population of 60-70,000 (this was an experiment in doing it at scale), here are some observations.

Openstreetmap doesn't have much terrain, although it has polygonal regions that might delineate land usage. I had to add terrain by hand.

It does have streets. Making that into something usable was a slightly different proposition. There are various ways to approach this. A couple are suggested here:
  • Get the street vectors out (which isn't hard) and use the rendering technique used by OSM itself. This consists of two copies of the lines (with rounded caps). One was rendered wider in grey and then a slightly narrower one was rendered in white on top. This seems to be slow to render in a drawing program though.
  • Stroke the paths to an appropriate width and convert to outlines (Illustrator, Inkscape and CorelDraw all have tools that will do this). You can then use union/weld operations to build up an overall object from the individual outlines. Illustrator's shape builder tool is particularly good for this.
Importing the drawing is still herniating Corel Draw. I'm using version X3. Not sure whether later versions will have this problem. If somebody has a more recent version, perhaps you could try opening the SVG file in that.

Adding the street names took a couple of days. These came from the big list of names here. I think I wouldn't bother with comprehensive street naming if I didn't need it; this took longer than the rest of the process put together. Again, this is an experiment in doing this at scale.
 
I've done some maps of villages for an adventure, and uploaded generic versions of the maps.



 
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