Hello...
Hey, Started Cartography a year ago to help along our D&D games.
Friend got me a book to help me get better at it, and recently I got a new Wacom tablet to try and do more things.
I've been looking for some good programs to work with, I'd like to even be somewhat interactive with my maps too if that's possible.
Zoom in and open up city lay outs that kind of thing.
Any suggestions or direction that can help me grow and learn with any of these things would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Laithwright and welcome to the Guild.
Not entirely sure what software to suggest. For map creation, most people use Photoshop, or possibly Illustrator (paid software), or Gimp, Krita and Inkscape (free software). A few people have been trying out Affinity's range of software recently, though with somewhat mixed results. There's also Campaign Cartographer which allows you to put maps together fairly quickly without hand-drawing. J.Edward put together a blog post a while back that listed all sorts of software, so you might want to check out some of the other apps he listed.
These programs will allow you to create maps from scratch but they won't allow zooming down to city level. You'd need a little coding experience for that. Our admin Redrobes put together a zoomy map for our Guild World project, which you can see here. It's somewhat limited as we haven't developed the city maps for it (well, apart from the community project Guild City - but that's just one city!) I believe these maps use a javascript program called Leaflet, so you might want to look into that.
Hope that info's useful but if you've got questions, ask away and I'm sure someone can help. Looking forward to seeing some of your work.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
welcome to the guild - when you're ready to map - make a thread in the WIP section for help and critique while you work
regs tilt
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Awesome Thank you. I'll look into all of those I imagine I have quite a bit to learn and dabble before I start getting anywhere.
I have some maps I can post up for Idea input and all that I just gotta get a printer scanner first.
But thank you for the knowledge.
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