# Mapping Resources > Mapping Elements >  Ships Compass

## ravells

Found a picture of a ship's compass in a Sunday Magazine and made this based on it. Please feel free to use it for your maps.

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## Sapiento

Wonderful!

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## Redrobes

That looks fantastic - but though I don't wish to be a kill joy, I presume by 'based on' there is some potential copyright problems with it if one were to use it in a commercial map - or is this your 3D work ? If it is, then scratch my warning and have some kudos cos it looks like a scan of a photo.

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## ravells

No copyright problems at all. It was all done in Serif Drawplus from scratch (2D), I'm chuffed you think it looks like a scan of a photo!

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## torstan

That's really excellent work. I'm with Redrobes there - it looks phenomenal.

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## ravells

Lol, thanks. Drawplus is becoming my first port of call when I want to draw anything these days. (I'm a Fanboi, I know  :Smile:  )

Here are some to share down with your mates at the lab, Torstan:


·         The tachyon leaves. The bartender says, "We don't serve your kind here." A tachyon walks into a bar.·         Heisenberg was a awful lover. Whenever he had the right position he never had the right speed, whenever he had the energy he never had the time.·         Some helium floats into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve noble gases here." The helium doesn't react.·         A neutron saunters up to the bar and orders a drink. "How much?" he asks, bartender says, "for you, no charge."·         A superconductor walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We don't serve your kind here." The superconductor leaves without any resistance.·         entropy ain't what it used to be.·         A neutrino walks into a bar. The bartender says "We don't serve your kind here." The neutrino says I'm just passing through."·         A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest says "your kind isn't welcome here". The boson replies: "but without me, how can you have mass?'·         An atom walks into a bar, orders a beer, takes one sip, and breaks down in tears. The bartender comes over and says, "Hey pal, whatsa matter?" Atom says, "I think I just lost an electron!" Bartender says, "Are you sure?" Atom says, "Yeah, I'm POSITIVE!"·         A Redditor searches for jokes about superstrings, but only finds a bunch of long threads.

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## Redrobes

Kudos indeed - Im impressed greatly ! How do you get the environment reflection in the boss of the needle in Drawplus then ? I have to load in an env map which I normally get from Debevcs site but thats a faff. Do you have a good way or is it built in with some cool option ?

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## ravells

It's dead simple. Drawplus comes bundled with reflection maps which you can apply to an object to get a reflective finish. I've just checked and it doesn't look like you can add your own custom ones though  :Frown: 

If you look at the screenie, on the left is the menu of (mostly) raster effects you can apply. One of which is the reflection map where you can choose the map, the opacity and the blend mode. On the right are 'pre-made' effects which employ various effects (drop shadow, procedural fills, colour fills, 3d lighting effects etc) from the menu on the left (you can save your own custom pre-made effects here).

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## torstan

They're brilliant - forwarded around the office. Thanks Ravells!

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## Steel General

Awesome Ravs... would it be possible to post one without the needle?

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## ravells

Sure. Attached.

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## Ascension

I gotta say, you're gettin me really intrigued with SD+

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## Djekspek

great stuff! downloading it now.. also snatched a copy of your awesome looking compass  :Very Happy:  thanks 'n cheers!

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## jtougas

Awesome!! added that to my compass collection  :Smile:

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## ravells

> I gotta say, you're gettin me really intrigued with SD+


What can I say? learning how to use it is a piece of cake. It's by far and away the fastest workflow graphic software I've ever come across. Sure, if you want to do huge maps with lots of fiddly bits, then nothing beats ps, but for working in vector/raster mix this just rocks (I'd say over and above Illustrator - which was so counter-intuitive I just hated it). There's a free download of an earlier version of it, all I can say, is give it a test drive.

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## Redrobes

r.e. env maps, thats really cool. Once you have a few as a selection then theres not much point in having customizable ones. Its just that without one at all it never looks right. I have to say I am intrigued with it too. I may give it a whirl. I agree that whilst I am sure illustrator / inkscape are powerful I cant get on with them either. I should try this and Xara at the same time and go with one or the other.

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## tilt

that looks fantastic - great work  :Smile:

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## jfrazierjr

Great stuff here Ravs.  Looks beautiful.   On a side note, I reinstalled linux not too long ago and upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10.  The other day I was browsing through software setting up some stuff and noticed Xara Xtreme was available, so I downloaded and installed it through the package manager.  I have not had a chance to play with it yet, I plan to sometime soon to try to get a feel for it.   Given that (to my understanding at least... which could be wrong) this is the same software which costs around $90 on Windows, this is a fairly good deal.   From what I understand, the code has been Open Source since 2006 and it seems like the developers are getting around to a good stable release on linux.

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## ravells

Wow, that's really cool, Joe. I wonder whether it's the up to date version or an older one? Seems a bit odd that they would release it for free on some platforms but not others.

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## jfrazierjr

> Wow, that's really cool, Joe. I wonder whether it's the up to date version or an older one? Seems a bit odd that they would release it for free on some platforms but not others.


Well, I am sure it is based upon an older version, just not sure how much older it is.    As for linux vs windows, since it's open source, it's really up to some community to compile the code and make any modifications needed to interact with the OS's GUI library.   I assume linux support is there because enough people use linux and worked on the development aspect.    IOW, Xara does not directly support the linux version in any way, that is the job of the open source project that builds the linux distro of it.   Anywhooo... I hope to spend some time playing around with it over the next few weeks.   Not sure at this point if I will spend enough time to convince me that it's better/easier than GIMP unless it just blows me away off the bat though.

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## jfrazierjr

After some additional reading, it appears that the linux community started working and then stopped.   From wikipedia and zaraxtrem.org site, there have been no updates in the past 2 years or so.   Note that per wikipedia, Zara still has a nightly build for linux, but I could not find any info on it from the zara site.   Also of note is that the rendering engine was NOT included in the Open Source code, so that part of the code was written by someone in the FOS community at some point.  I expect that this means that the linux version is not as fast windows version.

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## Jaxilon

Well it is a Vector based program for one so the result will be different than what you would get in Gimp. I've never used Linux but have always wanted to try it out. Maybe one of these days I will. As I understand it there are lots of open source programs for Linux that you have to pay for in Windows and that does seem funny. I'm sure GP could verify the Linux version of Xara is the current version or not?  Let us know how it goes jf.

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## Hai-Etlik

Last I checked, the Xara X for Linux release consisted of a proprietary binary library with an open wrapper around it.  That's why no one simply ported it back to Windows or abandoned the Inkscape project for it.

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## Port Paladine

Looks like I may need to step outside Photoshop and into this program sometimes

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