Welcome to the Guild!
Hello, everyone.
I do a lot of roleplaying, and have started running some games of my own. I only recently got into making maps for my campaigns (in that I only recently started running a game that needed a detailed map). I have some experience in art but not much, and would like to start making full-color maps (so far I've pretty much used line art). It's a different kind of art project than I've ever done, so I'm still learning the basics.
I have Gimp and Paint.net and am not very happy with either program, but I am still trying to get them to work for me. I can't afford commercial software, however, though I will be checking out some demos in the next few days, so if anyone has any software to recommend, please do.
For my first (real) map I used Sumo Paint, because I did most of the work on a computer where I couldn't install anything, but ran into problems with the fact that I couldn't get "paste" to work so I had to draw every single chair individually... for an entire three-story haunted mansion... By the end of it, some of them didn't even look like chairs anymore
So anyway, I found this site rather randomly by reading another forum where Cartographer's Guild was recommended to someone else. I've read through quite a few of the tutorials and am excited to get to work on coloring my map.![]()
Welcome to the Guild!
Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User
Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice!
Any questions on CC3? Post them with CC3 in the Subject Line!
MY 'FAMOUS' CC3 MAPS: Thunderspire; Pyramid of Shadows; King of the Trollhaunt Warrens; Demon Queen's Enclave
Welcome Aboard!
There are some excellent tutorials for the GIMP here, and a bunch of very knowledgeable users of that program (and also some Paint.Net users too). So don't give up on them yet.![]()
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Paint.Net is nice for smooth lines and inking, but it just doesn't have some features that I like (such as the smudge tool).
Gimp, I don't like the interface, but I can get over that. What I don't like is the brushes. Granted, I haven't downloaded any brush sets, but I'm used to just being able take what brushes are in front of me and make them do what I want them to do. Gimp doesn't like me playing with brushes. Heck, it doesn't like me *resizing* brushes. So I tend to open Gimp, think, "This isn't so bad. Why didn't I like this?" then I go to mess with the brushes and I think, "Oh, THAT's why," get frustrated, give up. Maybe I'm missing something, but I usually know my way around paint programs. I also don't like that it doesn't seem to like large files. I like high-resolution, large files so I can zoom way in to do detail work, but when I try to open a file like that in Gimp, I get a notice that the file is bigger than the maximum and the program starts going slowly.
Aaaaand those are my complaints.
I suppose if I had any sort of patience I could just switch between programs to do things, but after a few shots of "Draw a few lines in Paint.Net" then "Switch to Gimp to blend them" I get annoyed.