Bringing SexyMap to Druids

This Sexymap preset is now one of the pre-installed presets in the latest version of SexyMap. The tutorial will remain to show you how to create a preset from scratch. Enjoy!

One of the most interesting addons to hit the scene in the last while doesn’t do anything to help you become more efficient by measuring your performance, organizing your inventory, or visualizing your raid’s health. All it does is make your minimap look different. Well, not just different, but f!#@ing sexy. So much so that they named it SexyMap. Now, I realize that WoW Insider highlighted SexyMap a short time ago, but after you install it, you might notice that there’s really not much there for Druids. Several generic skins, several great skins for Mages, Warlocks, Paladins, even a Rogue skin, but nothing for the citizens of Moonglade. *weep* [ed. latest edition includes this preset, so this has been remedied!]

Luckily, SexyMap was built with customization in mind. Every one of the default skins is recreatable — in-game — with the configuration window. I’m going to take you step-by-step through creating my Druid preset, Emerald Portal.

First, you’ll want to actually download SexyMap from Curse or your favorite addon site. Also, if you want to experiment a little more, download TexBrowser, which allows you to see all the different textures you can use with SexyMap.

Once installed and in game, right-click on the mini-map to open the options for SexyMap. There’s a lot of options, but I’ll only go over a few of them that are necessary for you to achieve the same preset described here. By default, the zone text is displayed and we’ll want to remove that from marring our SexyMap, unless, of course, we hover our mouse over it. In the options, click on Zone Button from the left menu and click on On hover from the options for Show zone text… That’s really the only thing we need to change before we begin work on the minimap design.

Now for the fun part. Click on Borders from the left menu of the SexyMap options. You’ll probably see the options for default SexyMap. Click Clear & Start Over. Don’t worry. That default preset is called Blue Rune Circles and you can go back to it later if you really want.

SexyMap allows you to create a lot of different shapes of maps. We are going to stick with a circle, but there’s an option to have a circle with a faded edge. This will help give our design an integrated look. Where it says Minimap shape, select Faded Circle (Large) from the dropdown.

Every piece that goes into a SexyMap preset is called a “border”. This can be rather misleading as many of the parts aren’t really borders, but that’s what SexyMap calls them, so that’s what we’re going to call them. You can create a new border layer by entering a name in the Create new border textbox and clicking the Okay button that appears or pressing Enter. Let’s start by creating one called Background Leaves. Type that in the textbox and click Okay. It’s important to note that it doesn’t matter at all what you name these layers. They don’t even have to be unique. They are only to help you organize your layers.

Now, I’m going to go step-by-step and explain all the options and setup for the first border layer of this preset. This may seem rather involved and I’m going to present and explain a lot of material that isn’t completely necessary if you aren’t interested in tweaking the preset. But even if you decide to skip to the bottom and start setting up the layers on your own, you may find the following information a useful reference if you need it.

The border layer Background Leaves should now be listed in the bottom under Borders in the bottom. Click on the Background Leaves border in the list to the left and you’ll see its Entry Options in the right window. Here are all the options for an individual border layer. This is also where you can delete a layer if you no longer want it by clicking the Delete button. But we aren’t going to do that, so scroll down.

Next is the Texture Path options. If you have installed TexBrowser, you can click on the Open TexBrowser button to open TexBrowser in another window. TexBrowser isn’t that complex. You basically can browse through all the textures in the game and it will tell you the path you must use to that texture. While you can use any texture, some are completely unsuitable. I’d suggest sticking to the Particles, Spells, Textures, and XTextures. For now, just type Spells\TreantLeaves.blp in the Texture path textbox and click the Okay button that appears at the end of the textbox. This entry is not case-sensitive. You can type all lowercase, uppercase or mixed case, but it must match one of the textures in the game.

Scrolling down, Texture options is the next section. Click on the white square next to Texture tint. This brings up the Color Picker which should be familar from the Blizzard options. For this border layer, leave the color white and slide the opacity slider to about 50%. Click Okay to close the window.

The Layer dropdown determines which strata the border layers sit on. The order goes from 1 to 5, with 1 being on the bottom. Like layers of a cake, if you place something on the 1. Background all of the other layers will sit on top of it. Er, except you usually don’t have a background layer of a cake so maybe that wasn’t the best analogy. These leaves will sit under the map, so select 1. Background for Layer.

Blend Mode determines how the border layer interacts with the rest of the map. Add Blend usually makes all the colored portions of the map multiplied lighter against all layers beneath it. Alpha Key and Blend seem pretty similar in that they simply let the border layer’s opacity show what’s beneath it without making it lighter like Add Blend. Disable and Mod Blend aren’t really used in this preset and I haven’t found a good use for them. The best way to understand how the Blend Mode works is to experiment with it and see how it causes the layers to interact.

For this preset, select Blend for the Blend Mode.

The next section controls the rotation of the border layer and its layout on the minimap. If you chose to click Disable Rotation, it disables all of the rotation options and enlarges the texture for some inexplicable reason. For that inexplicable reason, I don’t recommend using that option, but rather to leave the rotation at 0 if you don’t want to use rotation.

One cool option, which I’m not using here but I’ll cover for sake of completeness, is the ability to base the rotation on the orientation of the player. In the Match player rotation box you can choose Do not match player rotation, Normal rotation, or Reverse Rotation. Normal rotation causes the texture to rotate left (counter-clockwise) when your player turns left and clockwise when your player turns right. Reverse rotation rotates left when the players turns right and vise versa. The Do not match player rotation option allows you to base the rotation on the next options below and by default isn’t selected.

If you aren’t basing the rotation on player rotation, you can either set its rotation speed or you can simply rotate the texture a set fixed rotation. Rotation Speed determines the speed with which the texture spins on its center axis. Positive values spin clockwise, negative values spin counter-clockwise. You can set the speed with the slider, or by typing in the numeric value below the slider in the textbox and pressing enter. Static Rotation rotates the layer, but doesn’t set it spin in a continual motion.

For the Background Leaves layer, enter 231 for the rotation of the leaves, or whatever other rotation looks best to you.

Lastly, we have the scale of the layer and its horizontal and vertical placement. Use 1.58 for the scale of the layer and leave the Horizontal nudge and Vertical nudge both at 0.

The first border layer is complete. Your minimap should look similar to the image to the right.

Now is a good time to save your preset. Click on the Preset tab and give your preset a name such as Emerald Portal in the Save current settings as preset… textbox. By typing the same preset name later you can save your changes into the same preset or you can branch off different versions if you want. After you’ve saved your preset, you can select it from the list of presets.

Now that you understand how to create one border layer, you should be able to recreate the rest of the border layers described below. For my version of this preset, I’ve used twelve border layers. I’m not sure how well some computers might handle this. If you need, I recommend stripping down the Nature Rune layers, removing the Glare layer and even maybe the Map Inner Glow and Map Outer Glow layers. This should lower the layers down to four layers. The nice thing about SexyMap is that you can choose and experiment as much as you want to create something that looks sexy to you.

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