3D Mapping Tools

[Irranshalee]

Does anyone know of some free or inexpensive mapping tools for homebrew games? I am just looking for some basic houses, shops and an inn. I wouldn't mind some rocks, water, bridges, and trees.

[Lemnis Recinsier]

I'm a big fan of Maptool for tabletop play.

I run two instances on my laptop, projecting the player view onto the table so I have fog of war for the players. There are libraries of artwork available on their website, and you can copy screenshots of anything on your screen and modify them in a paint program for new maps and images.

For example, I've rotated video game views to top down and hit print screen, then tabbed out to a photo editing program to paste and clip out the surrounding terrain to make new minis for the program. You can also swing around to the front of your character and attach a portrait to the mini.

Campaign Cartographer has a free version, as well as city and dungeon tools. They even have interior maps you can link to the city buildings.

These tools aren't 3D, but they're very versatile.

For a 3D view, I've actually taken the time to build things in Minecraft on creative mode. It takes a long time, but sometimes you just gotta have 3D.

[Tinalles]

It's not really ready for prime time quite yet, but take a look at MapForge. They ran a kickstarter for it recently, and it's in alpha releases right now -- somewhat behind schedule because their programmer spent a month fighting off bronchitis.

While the software isn't so great just yet, they also inherited a ton of assets from the now-defunct Dundjinni. You can find those at MapForgeForum.com. It's got categorized images by the hundreds, including buildings, trees and plants, furniture, all kinds of dungeon dressing, and more outre things like blood splatters and so on. Those are generally just PNGs that can be used in any image editor. I mostly do my mapping in Photoshop (with some Inkscape on the side for vector work), but having a ton of pre-made assets like these that I can just drop in.

[heruca]

There's now an Indiegogo campaign for MapForge, and as you'll see in the two videos posted on the campaign page, asset-browsing speed is now super-fast.