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DM/GMs, what map making tools do you use?
What tools do you use to make maps for your table?
I've tried looking and I have found a few decent generators, but I'm really looking for a making tool I already have a general layout in my head of what the city/region/continent but I can't draw for shit, and I want to find a tool that makes this easy? Makes it look nice, makes it easy to add points of interest and features, etc.
What do you use?
Edit: for clarification, this is for city/region maps, not battlemaps.
Do you mean battle maps or region maps?
Based on your post I'm assuming you mean region maps, in which case I use Wonderdraft. I use it over something like Inkarnate because it's a one time purchase rather than a subscription, and is an actual application on my PC instead of a web app.
If you happen to mean battle maps, then I use Dungeondraft. It's made by the same person and is really useful. It's more limited than just using an image editor, but it works well enough for me. The default assets for it are a little lacking though (in number, not quality) and have a more cartoony look to them than I'd want, so I use Forgotten Adventures Dungeondraft integration.
Oh yes, I should have clarified, region/city maps is what I meant. I have some dry erase battlemaps that I use for now, though I may want to explore that more in the future. So thanks for the recommendations! I'll check them out!
I wish you luck in finding something for city maps. Much like @Crimson, I use Wonderdraft and Dungeondraft, but neither of them can really hit the city map niche all too well.
There are generators and guides that work okay until you need something specific for a map of a town, then all logic flies out the window and you're kind of screwed.
Damn really? That is really lame, cause I do have a pretty good idea of how I want my city to look, and I can't get anything similar from a generator.
Have you used the Procgen Arcana city generator? I used it recently for a city of my own that I had specific ideas for. The generation is good and varied, and you can (with some fiddling) edit things like block and terrain shapes. It's certainly more of a generator than an editor though, the edit tools need some work. I'd say it's worth playing around with if you haven't tried it already.
Inkarnate is also supposed to be good for making all kinds of maps (mainly world but also battle and settlement) but I haven't used it in a while. Could be worth checking out what people have done with it city-wise to see if it fits what you need. It's definitely an editor, not a generator.
These are fine when you don't have something specific. But if your idea for the city/town is "there's a big rock jutting out of the middle", it just can't work. Or even being on the side of a hill. Or being built around a mine.
It's fine if you want a small fishing village or something farming-related, but otherwise it's just mostly generic.
Agree. I had to fiddle with it a lot to get what I wanted. It's very hard to get unusual features if that's what you have in mind. But the quality of the result is so good that I felt it was still worth mentioning.
I've looked at Inkarnate, but it seems lacking in features to me.
I'll check out Procgen Arcana Generator, haven't heard of that one, thanks!
I love DungeonDraft for battle maps. It is fantastic and you can make wild and massive maps. I've used WonderDraft for larger maps, but it doesn't do city maps well - it specializes more regional and geography. It does feel a little outdated, but it does what I want it to do.
Related post with lots of good info and resources:
https://tildes.net/~games.tabletop/15qw/with_map_in_hand_finding_maps_for_your_vtt_rpg
This is fantastic, thank you!
I've used dungeondraft and it's cool. Gets the job done, but there's a bit of learning curve. And the app can get bogged down if you load too many assets...
I don't know how you feel about AI trends, but I just asked Bing for a "dnd style map of a city with a castle, overhead view, with grid lines" and got some pretty decent results that could be pretty easily edited in Photoshop or something (I use GIMP... It's free and very comprehensive!).
You could even import the bing image into Dungeondraft for editing or adding assets.
I use Gimp as well, so I'm familiar with that. The issue is I have a specific layout in mind for my city already so a randomly generated city won't really help me. Good to know for the future though.
Have you considering using Stable Diffusion with a LoRA and controlnet with a canny edge map of your current city? It lets you force the generation into specific composition layouts and the LoRA lets you set art styles.
Some examples
https://civitai.com/search/models?sortBy=models_v2&query=city%20map
https://civitai.com/search/models?sortBy=models_v2&query=d%26d%20map
As someone who has almost zero knowledge of AI beyond how to type, could you elaborate on... all of that?
Sorry for the delay in responding. Allow me to elaborate
Stable Diffusion is the most popular open source model for AI image generation. While there are online tools for running it the best experience is running it locally especially for people that have decently powerful PCs(any modern gaming PC is good enough). There are several different user interface tools for running it. The most popular choice is automatic1111's webui as it features extensions to add to additional capabilities to the software including controlnet.
Once you have it installed you have to download a model. Models are custom versions of the original stable diffusion model that are fine-tuned to a specific task. The most common place for this is civit.ai. A variety of models may work for this but I know that 2dn is a model that is popular with people generating art form their D&D games
LoRA stands for low rank adaptation and is essentially a filter that you add to shape the output of the image generation further specializing the output. They are typically used to either a specific character or artstyle to a work. They can also be downloaded from civit.ai as well. Make sure you get one that compatible with the version of Stable Diffusion that you are using(typically SD 1.5)
ControlNet is an extension of stable diffusion that lets you preset an outline or pose for a work and have the software fill in the details. The version of it for automatic1111's webui is found here. You feed in an existing image of what you want something to look like such as a basic pencil sketch and the model builds the output from that.
If you are a noob at this its kind of overwhelming. If our timezones line up I would be happy to get on a video chat and walk you through the process.
I do love an installation guide that immediately starts with Nvidia (Recommended) when I use an AMD card.
I feel like I'm smart enough to know that this is going to give me a headache, if that makes sense?
I enjoy it because its my hobby but as someone who is mostly interested in it as a means to some other purpose I could see it be frustrating. If you would like you can send me the map you have and the style you want it to be in and I could generate this particular thing for you. Obviously that wont work long term but if you want to at least see the capabilities before putting yourself through the trouble that would work.
See my problem is I limped my way into installing it until it said I needed to downgrade python.
Honestly, I'm willing to put in the work to get it working, there's just things like that that make me second guess if it can actually even be helpful to me, given my low to mid tier card.
The graphics card you have is a bottleneck but way less of one than I expected. I actually initially got started using only a NVIDIA 1050 TI which is quite an old card. I have since upgraded after getting more serious about about localhosting AI but the barrier to get a basic setup going is not usually your card. Automatic1111's UI is the most popular but ComfyUI is my preferred UI because its actually more resource efficient. You can try it's installer if A1111's UI is giving you issues.
I hadn't heard of any of these before, I'll give it a look, thank you!
If you ever want a simple map maker for dungeon crawling, check out DungeonScrawl
It’s dead Simple for laying out rooms and hallways quickly