My biggest need is for the ability to map continents, nations, castles, cities, and so on. The ability to create encounter scale maps would be nice, but it isn't a requirement. The ability to map at both the urban and regional scales is. Price isn't my main factor, but I can't afford to shell out something like a hundred dollars. Can anyone help me with this? The only paid software I can think of is Campaign Cartographer, but I don't know if that's what I need or not.
I own Campaign Cartographer (and used it, until I switched to Linux). It will do all of those things. It has something of a steep learning curve, though. I think there are some pretty good tutorials available online.
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Dundjinni has gone the way of the dodo, so really CC3 is the only solution other than hand drawing or using the crude overland mapping capability in maptool. Which is unfortunate, because CC3 is a very poorly implemented CAD frontend, which frustrates me (a professional surveyor who uses AutoCAD on a daily basis) to no end.
Would professionl CAD software perhaps work better? I can probably get it pretty easily, since I study geography.
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I doubt it. Most CAD software is a vector based drawing suite, and though that would be great for doing basic black & white dungeon spaces, its not very useful for an overland or continental sort of thing. Campaign Cartographer has some randomization lines for things like coastlines, etc, but its lack of a thorough layer management system makes drawing things on-top of other things a frustrating and ctrl-z filled task.
Ideally if CC3 can somehow get a decent CAD coder to smooth over their CLI commands and drafting tasks, then it would be a very excellent product instead of just a pretty good product :P Though its been a few years since I really used the program for anything but maptool object token images. They may have made some progress in their usability since then.
Also, a good place for advice is the Cartographer's Guild, though I can't access it from work and don't know how active their site still is.
Thanks. I'll look it up when I get home.
If you have Photoshop CS5 or newer, then you could make use of the template I developed to facilitate the mapping of landforms and cities. For continents, its use is quite simple as you are primarily painting altitudes with the template then overlaying and blending the appropriate textures for you.
The download link and a quick tutorial can be found here:
Photoshop PSD: Terrain Template
Here are a few examples:
- Skull n' Shackles site with some alternate textures
- Small City with Kingmaker tokens
- Metropolis with some custom legends
- Country with political labels added
- Planet (WIP)
In addition, the most recent version of the template should have the same color scale calibration as Fractal Terrains 3. This means you could create a world (or smaller scene) in FT3, export the heightmap to Photoshop for some customization, then save the finished product from Photoshop and overlay it atop a spherical projection in FT3, like so.
Lastly, I would recommend checking out this thread for some good tips on how to get up-to-speed on mapping. There's also a recent Kickstarter that was successfully funded showcasing another professional cartographer's skills and the use of vector-based graphics. He's still writing the books, but a number of the tutorials should be visible on his existing website.
Hope this helps!
Unfortunately, Photoshop costs more than a month's pay. I have GIMP, if that works well enough.
Forgot to check that other site. Headed over there now.
Last I checked (a couple months ago) GIMP didn't support instanced smart objects well enough for that template to work. Sorry. :(
Hope FT3 and the programs listed in that Kickstarter are of use to you at least...
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I'll put in another plug for Campaign Cartographer (www.profantasy.com). As I am not a professional AutoCAD user, I don't find the interface poor, although the learning curve is steep.
Though I am not particularly artistic, I've seen some really beautiful maps come out of the software, and have been able to make functional maps for my own use.