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[eViLe_eAgLe]

The title should say it all, but as a long time lurker of bay12 and a decently long player of Dwarf Fortress, along with being a member of the cartographers guild, I thought "What's better then this contest?" It's perfect, I tell you. On a side note, i'm simply wondering what to do. A drawing of a fortress, or something of the entire world or a single region.
If you want to see what I can do, you can find some work here.

http://evile-eagle.deviantart.com/gallery/

I was going to show you something I was working on for my friends, but, nah.
But, back on topic. What i'm asking for is what should I draw? And in what style? Any suggestions work, I could, if you guys wanted, I could recreate boatmurdered or any other popular succession fortress.

[chevil]

Make a map of a dungeon in a town.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

But, that's so vague D:

[hops]

Yeah, you should drop in one of the succession fortress threads and ask for a save, then draw a map from them.

[chevil]

Gen a world. (500+ years)
Start adventure mode.
Train a bit.
Go to the capital.
Enter the dungeon.
Make a map of the needlessly complex system of tunnels while killing/avoiding things that lurk there.

This is probably the hardest map to make from DF but it would be impressive.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Oh gosh, xD It wouldn't be too hard, it would just be really long and large.

[Cruxador]

You can always gen a world and do that. That seems to be the default assumption. Barring that, pick an old fort, or a city, and do it. Though if you pick a fort, good luck getting those z-levels to make sense.

[freeformschooler]

Wow. You're really amazing at what you do, EE.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Thanks, and i'll probably just gen a world and do that. Seems the best bet, maybe illustrate a small story found in the gen-history.

[sambojin]

I'm thinking of doing a small or medium world, with section outs. For general work flow, I'll finish the main world map first, then start working on the rest. I'm not sure if I'll animate the the main map (though I'm damned tempted to) just due to my facination with little sparkly bits of water and smoke from volcanoes etc.

On a technical scale, I think I'll probably make the map, divide it into a 4x4 grid, then make a bunch of grey-scale plasma fractals each of about 1024x1024. Massage the hell out of them so they actually represent the scenary in the ascii map, raising mountains, flattening plains and giving it an actual coastline shape. Join them all back up again and smooth the joints between them so there's no huge map edge drop-offs/rises. Then run it all through Fractint's 3d projection visualizer with a basic texture map and see if it comes up looking anything like the source ascii map. Massage fractals again until it does.

Then save the projection all as one layer and go pixel painting in PSP. Probably with about 3 or 4 different layers, one terrain, one terrain features, one for annotations, one for animated segments. Then open up legends, look for anything that catches my eye, mainly for "here be dragons" annotations as well as having a vague idea of cities etc.

Then I'll look at doing some cut-outs for more localized areas. Maybe. Just making a 4096x4096 map takes a while, but I'll see how it works out.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

I look forward to seeing it
As for me, I think i'm going to go with a shaded relief painterly styled map.
Might change my mind though, not completely sure yet.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Or, something like this. (Can't show the full image, haven't worked out the copyright for it yet, and I also need to finish it.)