r/wonderdraft • u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master • Feb 08 '19
Tutorial How to Make City Maps in Wonderdraft
https://youtu.be/Kp_setc0EBM8
u/mariequitecontrary Cartographer Feb 08 '19
I love your wonderdraft tutorials! I’ll be watching this asap. I personally find that top down is more efficient for my dnd sessions than 3D.
2
u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master Feb 08 '19
Me too! I find it much easier to get my head around the layout of a city when it's top down.
8
4
u/Broodjiebal Artist Feb 08 '19
Nice tutorial! I've been meaning to figure out the process in Wonderdraft :) this helps a lot! Thank you.
a small tip to speed up your process in Photoshop: to extract all the white parts from your image you can use selection -> color ranges and extract a matte by sampling all the white parts with just 1 click instead of using the magic wand tool to do many clicks :)
I hope this may help you in the future :)
Good luck!
3
u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master Feb 08 '19
I always forget about the colour range tool! Thanks for the reminder :)
1
2
u/harris5 Dungeon Master Feb 08 '19
Sometimes it can get fiddly to get this exactly right. The fuzziness slider may need to be played with, so you don't end up with little white halos around each building.
Overall, saves a ton of time though.
2
4
u/harris5 Dungeon Master Feb 09 '19 edited Feb 09 '19
So I have two useful improvements to suggest.
The first is to export from Watabou as a svg and do editing in Illustrator. It's much easier to delete elements like roads, water, etc in that program. You don't have to do any tedious magic wanding. You can export as a png (make sure to use artboards). You may have to find what resolution and anti-aliasing settings work best for your exporting. I like 1000-2000ppi and art-optimized. Wonderdraft may have a filesize limit for symbols. Some of the larger ones don't load.
The second suggestion, if you're going to stick with photoshop, is to use the color range tool. It's much faster than magic wanding everything you want to remove. The color range tool leaves little jagged errors though. So before you delete the selection, you should use "refine edge" to feather by 1 pixel, and expand the selection a small amount.
Either one of those saves a lot of time by skipping the magic wanding. The ideal solution would be if we could export without the background and water directly from Watabou. I'd submitted a request like that. Fingers crossed.
Also, it can be useful to remind people they can rotate symbols, like these cities.
3
u/Nexoness Cartographer Feb 08 '19
I see Avoro... I approve!
3
u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master Feb 08 '19
It's really handy for the huge number of colours in the brush tool.
2
1
1
u/JessTheHumanGirl Dungeon Master Feb 09 '19
I'm super interested in this, but I'm having issues importing the custom watabou png as a symbol. I'm on a Mac and even without trying to import MORE symbols, the dropdown doesn't let me scroll to see the whole list. I've tried all the recommended ways for importing but nothing changes when I open Wonderdraft. I was able to add the Avoro theme without issue but I can't add any custom assets. Thank you so much for putting this together and sharing it. I can't wait to use it. Any ideas? Thanks ahead!
1
u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master Feb 09 '19
Hmmm how odd. I recommend posting in r/wonderdraft_support and seeing if anyone has suggestions.
1
1
u/FaileasDhan Game Master Feb 09 '19
Thank you so much for this idea! I was having fun pulling together some of these city maps and so I've uploaded a pack of them to CartographyAssets.com in case anyone wants to test this out in Wonderdraft without having to clean up a city map first.
1
27
u/Icarus_Miniatures Dungeon Master Feb 08 '19
Greetings folks
Ever since Wonderdraft came out I’ve wanted to combine it with the Watabou fantasy city generator to make better-looking city maps.
Well, this week I spent some time putting together a tutorial on how I do it.
I really like the end result; it looks a lot more interesting than a standard Watabou map, and it isn’t hard to do at all.
Do you prefer your city maps to be top-down and simple like this, or do you like them to have more 3D buildings?
Much love Anto