Any tips on making map Piece icons?

[HwitVlf]

I'm working on some cliff Pieces and was trying to figure the best way to make icons- meaning the little tile bmps that show up in the editor. ‎  Does anyone have tips on how to make those icons so they are easy to comprehend when building maps? I expect Ben would be the expert but any tips would be appreciated.

I think confusing icons was the main problem with Todd's cliff set and also several of the Japanese Piece sets.

[Verdite]

The best advice i can give you is to create a map icon according to how your model is facing. So assuming its front face is on the x axis you'd draw a map icon that has a horizontal line. If you are making a corner, go into meta's top view and replicate the angle in your paint/paintshop/gimp suite. I generally try to make different map parts as different and as colourful as possible. For multiple floors i draw numbers on them, so for 2 floors id draw a 2. I can send you my custom icons if you'd like.

[dmpdesign]

Its really odd, for me my icons made perfect sense but no one else could understand them :)

I would give advice, but obviously it would be bad lol.

Hmm. Maybe Ill rework some icons and post and see what you guys think.

[HwitVlf]

The 'core' cliff Piece icons were clear. It's just that several triangles/corners etc looked similar, especially when they were rotated so I had a hard time telling which piece I needed to build the shape I wanted. I'm going to try to use your cliff set for a certain area in my game so I think reworked icons would be an excellent and fairly easy thing to do.

Ben, a collection of icons would be helpful. I think good icons can make map building go faster.

[Verdite]

John ill PM you to 243 of my icons ‎ 

[HwitVlf]

Thanks Ben! Just glancing over them I already see a couple methods that should be useful

[Verdite]

They are probably more arty than practical, im working on a new set that i'll hopefully setup similiar to SoM's icon set.

[Verdite]

Has anyone any custom icons to share? They are something I need on a regular basis, so any would be welcome.

Feel free to use these!

[Madison Lastrega]

the way I make Icons is based on the particular piece I am working on.... I found it easiest to just open any existing icon and edit it and resave a different file name :) ‎  like for my earthworth sets... I make them with the same texture samples as the piece for walls and corners I use a black line so when buiding its easy to layout... and for 1x3 or 3x3 I use solid colors and usualy a marking to show its size.... Boy how I love regualr "Paint"

so my pieces are sorta custom with the set...... I would like to release a complete SQS ULTRA edition of SoM once I am done with all my map parts... then my icons will make sence I hope .... bvut making universal icons is hard because every artist is differnt .........ML

[HwitVlf]

I've always struggled with icons myself. I made that tool to auto generate 10,000 icons, but they're not really user friendly for small sets. The tool assembles each icon from a set of quarter-icons. In this case, the quarters had numbers 0-9. I could adapt it to use other quarter-icons, but I can't picture that being very useful for making "easy to comprehend" icon sets. If you'd like the et of 10,000 auto generated let me know.