Hi all

[jimmcdonald]

Excited to find this site. I'm in Utah, and am interested in making fantasy maps and such. Looking right now for a program that does great maps and is amateur friendly, any and all help would be very appreciated.

[Freodin]

Hi Jim, and welcome to this forum.

There are quite a number of alternatives of programs to do maps with... pixel-oriented painting programms like Photoshop or GIMP, vector-oriented programms like Illustrator or Inkscape, even some mapping-specialized programms like Campaign Cartographer.

You can also find a lot of good tutorials on the forum here, for about all of these programms.

For starters, I would advise you to check out Gidde's great tutorial. It is accessable even for amateurs, uses the free programm GIMP... and you can definitly do great maps with this method!

[Chick]

Hello, Jim, welcome to the Guild!

The secret of making exceptional maps is hard work learning how. Any of the programs that Freodin suggested, reading lots of tutorials on here, and then practice, practice, post a map for critique, practice more. No one here was born knowing how to do this

[Deadshade]

Welcome Jim.

Just a word of caution - there are no programs that are amateur friendly and do maps all alone
Most have a quite steep Learning curve so that you wont progress without practicing, doing the tutorials and then some more.
The choice of programs also depends whether you want only free software or are ready to pay a bit too. Fractal Tarrain is f.ex quite nice for realistic world scale maps but it costs a bit.

[johnvanvliet]

maps are basically Artwork
now anyone can paint by numbers or fallow a video of painting a "tree by a lake "

but
it dose take practice ,practice,practice and MORE practice

now the type of map also will need more or less time to master

a AAA road map VS a real map
( i live in Michigan so.....)

say this ( random Google find)
http://www.nfld.com/archive/maps/7-p25.jpg
http://www.mapsofpa.com/18thcentury/1754overton.jpg

or a simple top down dungeon map ( circa 1984 D&D )
( random Google find)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vzXwRvGmlQ...600/img006.jpg

or this ( random Google find)
http://www.fantasticmaps.com/wp-cont...risometric.jpg
http://dungeonsmaster.com/wp-content...trials-map.jpg

[Chick]

Poor Jim, worded his initial post in a way that made everyone feel he was trying to find an easy way to be awesome I think we've made the point.

Jim, welcome again, I'm sure we'll all look forward to seeing your work when you are ready to post

[Bogie]

Hi Jim, Welcome to the Guild. I won't disagree with any of the above, BUT, I will throw my 2 cents in: Don't wait until you think your maps are good enough to post, just post what you have and we will help you make them better, as long as you are open to constructive criticism. Heavy on the "constructive", light on the "criticism" part.

[Corilliant]

Welcome Jim!
Just dig in...it's not cake, but then again who was the idiot who said that making cake was easy?