Mapmaking on a Mac

[GM_Todd]

Hey everyone. I'm looking for a suitable mapmaker, but it's tough to find one on a Mac. I've tried Dundjinni and liked what I saw, but it appears the store is offline and has been for sometime. I'm looking to create encounter/battle maps more than continent or city maps.

I have access to Photoshop, but not any meaningful artistic skill, so I'm struggling with how best to use it to make helpful maps. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

[brock]

GM_Todd wrote:

Hey everyone. I'm looking for a suitable mapmaker, but it's tough to find one on a Mac.

Profantasy runs quite happily in a Virtual Box virtual machine running a spare copy of XP that I had. I've never tried to run it under Wine, but that might be another way to get it going on a Mac.

I've never found anything Mac native, so I'm eager to hear what others have to say too.

[GM_Todd]

I found MapTools to be quite helpful since posting my original inquiry. You should check it out.

http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=maptool

I'm open to others' suggestions, though.

[Rezdave]

brock wrote:

Profantasy ... under Wine ... might be another way to get it going on a Mac.

Unfortunately, won't work, at least for CC2P and CC3, due to the low-level coding and direct-processor calls.

GM_Todd wrote:

I'm looking to create encounter/battle maps more than continent or city maps.

I have access to Photoshop ... suggestions are appreciated.

I routinely scan or PShop digital maps. I wouldn't say that I have "artistic" skills in the sense of painting from scratch, but I have graphic design skills and a knowledge of Photoshop that makes life easy.

Here are some suggestions:

Making From Scratch Battle Maps:

1) Remember that this isn't fine art, and it will probably get thrown away after a session or two. Stick to low-resolution like 10-20 DPI.

2) Don't go for "photo-quality" in color any more than resolution. In fact, use the LEVELS control to intentionally adjust Gamma and fade out the image, resulting in significant cost-savings in ink/toner. It will still look cool, but won't distract from the action and now Miniatures and Tokens will stand out more.

3) Needs a Grassy Field ... just download photos from the internet. You can use Layer Masks and an air-brush to start blurring the hard edges or removing items you don't want, then just start collaging. You can do the same for almost any terrain.

4) Rubber-stamp is your best friend.

Making a Grid:

1) Create a grid by first drawing a 1-3 pixel (depending on DPI) black line horizontally across the screen (use Shift to constrain the angle). If necessary duplicate the line and slide them end-to-end to get full-screen coverage.

2) Now Duplicate your line and shift it vertically as many pixels as your DPI. Link and flatten.

3) Now Duplicate the flattened layer, shift them so that top/bottom lines overlay (giving you three lines on-screen) and again shift for DPI.

4) Flatten-and-Repeat until you have horizontal lines across the entire screen.

5) Now Duplicate one more time and Rotate 90 degrees, giving you a grid.

6) Just like you don't need full color-saturation in your art you also don't need/want full-black lines (they are distracting) so reduce the layer-opacity to ~70% (or wherever you like).

Adapting Old, Scanned Hand-Cartography Maps:

A shocking number of old 1st & 2nd Ed. maps that I still use had hand-spaced grid-lines, resulting in highly-irregular grid-spaced. To compute the spacing, use the Measuring Tool to measure the distance across 10 grids, then average.

Converting Existing Digital Art into a Battle Map:

1) Use the Measuring Tool to determine the number of pixels in a standard square and set that as your DPI in Image Size (without resampling, obviously). If you need to up-size or down-size the resolution, then you can re-sample.

2) If your existing art is 10' scale and you need 5', then use "Making a Grid" above to add in the interleaved lines. Remember to adjust the Gamma/Opacity to match the existing artwork, but you can vary line-width to make counting 10' distances easier.

3) Use Layers to overpaint secret doors and traps. Usually you can Rubber Stamp another section of floor, wall or whatever to cover them.

Printing Your Map:

There are two basic ways you can print you Battle-map:

1) If you're planning to cut out the map room-by-room and tape it together (such as in the case of a dungeon-crawl or cavern complex) then the easiest thing to do is simple reduce your canvas to the printable paper size, then shift the maps around within the canvas and print it multiple times on-the-fly so that you get center-of-page coverage for a given room, group of chambers or whatever, depending upon size. You can then scissor them out at the table and tape sections together as the Party explores.

2) For a set-piece battle or large map, you might desire to have full-pages irrespective of room, wall and other object locations. In this case, I do the following:

A) Determine how many pieces of paper are required in each axis in order to print the map, resulting in Column and Row values;

B) Duplicate the map file to produce a "Master" copy that you can set aside and safeguard;

C) Re-duplicate the file as many times as needed so that you have a copy for each "Column" (and name then A, B, C, etc.);

D) Open the "Column A" file and use Canvas Size to crop it to the desired width, given your printable area. Be sure to "pin" the Canvas to the left;

E) Repeat the process with your additional columns using Canvas Size to trim them, hanging either left or right as-needed with each iteration;

F) Once all Columns are finished, duplicate each Column file for the necessary number of Rows (and rename then A1, A2 ... );

G) Again, use Canvas Size to trim the Columns to size, using top-bottom rather than left-right pinning;

H) Save all resulting files as JPEG to save space and trash and PShop versions ... print, trim the margins and then tape together and enjoy.

If you have questions about a specific map, feel free to ask.

HTH,

Rez

[GM_Todd]

That's awesome advice. Thank you!

[loaba]

When making area maps, I liked Photoshop (or any app that allows for independent layers.)

[JonathanRoberts]

Maptool is a good option if you're using it purely for online pay, but the lack of a printable export function makes it a bit lacking as a mapmaking tool for print maps. I love it for online play however.

For creating maps from scratch, photoshop actually does a good job. You don't need excellent art skills. In fact mostly what you need is all the Dunjinni art you've already found. Go to the Dunjinni user forums and download the items you want to populate your dungeon with.

Creating a basic dungeon in Photoshop:

In photoshop you want to start off by creating a background with your floor and walls. To do this, do the following:

• Set up your grid. Go to Preferences -> Grids and Guides and set the grid size to the size you want one square to be. For print you can set this to 1 inch, for online play I'd recommend setting it to 100px. I would set the subdivisions to 2 so that you can also have things snap to the middle of squares. Hit Command-' to turn the grid on.
• Fill your background layer with a nice stone texture. Either find a repeating pattern (like this) or just paste in a large image of rock. Setting up a custom pattern in photoshop is a little involved, but worth learning. There's a great walkthrough here.
• Create a new layer (command-shift-N) - this is where we'll put our walls.
• Use the rectangular select tool to start selecting areas that you want to be solid walls - and then fill them with black. The grid will automatically snap the selection to the grid.

Now you have a basic floorplan, but it's worth doing a couple of things to pretty it up a little. Double click your walls layer in the layer manager. This will open up the layer styles window. This gives you some nice tools. I find that the following options are good starts:
• Drop shadow with distance=0, opacity=100%, size=20px
• Inner Glow, colour=9495a7, opacity 50%, size=20px
• Stroke, size 1px, position=inside
Play around with these and see what happens, you can do a lot in this panel.

Now to populate your dungeon. Either take your Dunjinni haul (or my free dungeon items) and use the File->Place command to drop them into your dungeon. Use the Layers Window and Folders to keep track of everything and make sure you name them as you place them so that you can go back and tweak it easily later. It shouldn't take too long to get something that looks reasonable.

That's longer than I meant, but still way short of a proper tutorial. I can expand on things that are confusing or difficult (I'm sure there are some), just let me know.

Laying over a grid::

I've uploaded a photoshop grid file here and a pattern file here. You can place the pattern into you PS patterns file and that will let you create a grid in any document.

• You can throw a 100px grid over any map by creating a new layer, hitting shift-F5 to fill the layer and picking the grid pattern from the patterns option. Set that layer to multiply, and it will add a grid over anything.

For printing out maps - I can't recommend Posterazor highly enough. It does the chopping and pdfing of large jpgs automatically - and it runs on a Mac.

For more advice, you'll get a lot out of the Cartographers Guild. Happy to answer any questions.

[Dorje Sylas]

With Dunjinni a bit defunct I've gone back to CAD or Vector drawing Apps. Currently I use Artboard but I'm keeping half an eye on iDraw 2 (if it ever gets released) to see if it will integrate better with my iPad. Artboard is the offshoot of a Mac Cartogrpahy program. Just needs SVG export.

I also use TouchDraw on my iPad, but iDraw is slowly creaping up on features. Hard to say which is better at this point.

[yellowdingo]

MS WORD CARTOGRAPHY

Source: my blog

[Dorje Sylas]

An interesting "toy" for amateur nature scene production. Terra-Rey 4 is on sale in the App Store for 4.99. It's not a fully featured as big programs like Bryce, but for 4.99 or 11.99 (full price) it seems to be a good deal for really basic (read home RP production) work.

Makes some interesting stuff (done in the Demo)

[mearrin69]

I also suggest checking out http://www.cartographersguild.com when you get a chance. Lots of help for you there.
M