Hey all, I'm working right now on a homebrew campaign (time travelling wizard out to destroy existence, fights his future self, nothing crazy haha) and I want to work on map construction. I'll need generally three orders of magnitude: rooms(1 square=5 feet), city size (1 square= roughly 1/4 of a city block) and a national map as well. I'm not the most artistically inclined, so I'm wondering what's a good program or system that will do the job for you fairly well. Other questions, but let's just start with this one.
I've found that Campaign Cartographer 3 quite nicely covers those three requirements, if you can take the time to learn how to use it well. You can even get a free download from ProFantasy themselves that lets you do the old Basic D&D overland hex maps.
Having said that, Dundjinni is a very straight forward paint programme that lets you create quite complex interior (dungeon or building, even natural caverns) very quickly and simply.
I swap between the two depending on my needs and the amount of time I have available to prepare things.
Reggie.
That's some really good advice. Thanks guys. Reggie, I'm interested in the campagin Cartographer you mentioned. Do you have a link?
They make Campaign Cartographer and a bunch of other utilities. Be aware it can easily rack up to quite a bit of cash if you decide you want the whole thing, and it has a steep learning curve, but the results can be staggering.
Dungeonographer is very nice, is free, and runs from your web browser, so no need to download. They also have a hex-map utility.
I use Gimp. Its free and extremely powerful. The only real issue is that the learning curve is a friggen cliff. That said once you figure out how to use it you'll find that not only is it powerful enough to do practically anything but the skills you pick up in learning it can be utilized in RL for all sorts of things.
I can highly recommend dropping into the cartographers' guild if you need advice on CC3 or Gimp. Just make sure to put the software in the post title as there are lots of different software choices used over there. You should find some good tutorials too.
I suggest Fractal Mapper 8, by NBOS Software. I use it all the time, and it's great. There's literally a ton of free stuff out on the web for it (you can use any JPG artwork for any program in it, just drop the JPG into a specific directory, and it shows up as a tool). It comes with great tutorials that walk you through how to use it. The learning curve is not easy, but it's way easier than GIMP. I'd say about a 3.5 out of 10 on the difficulty curve.
EDIT : I have Campaign Cartographer 3 as well, but I never use it. It's too much of a pain (and too expensive) to add graphics to it. I can get all the artwork I need for free for FM8, whereas I have to buy expansion packs for CC3. I also find FM8 to give more realistic maps if I use 3D terrain and buildings (downloadable off internet), and to be easier to use to boot.