New to Digital Cartography? Software General Information

[pyrandon]

Hello, Airith and welcome to paradise! I hope you find a lot of inspiration, discussion, and instruction at the Guild!

My two cents on which program you should get is GIMP. Why? First, it's 100% free, and you said you cannot dish out the cash for even CC. Second, it's very flexible and--once you learn the basics (which can be gleaned from on-line tutorials) it's very, very powerful. You can make professional quality maps in GIMP!!! Thirdly, we have great users of GIMP here (*cough*RobA*cough*) who regularly post tutorials and are eager to help newbies learn.

I hope that helps. Welcome once again!

[Torq]

I agree completely with Pyrandon. Gimp is to my mind the most software you can get for your buck anywhere (which is of course no bucks at all). If you struggling to break into GIMP a good way to build up you confidence and skills might be to generate one of the cities in the RPG city generator that you mentioned and then just mess around with it for a while using Gimp. For a bit of a laugh that may prove quite useful run every script-fu on it and then take it from there.

I used the same generator and then toyed with it in gimp in my "Small Town" thread in the WIP section. Then just post something and the magicians on this site will come up with some incredible advice. That I promise.

Oh yes, welcome, welcome, welcome.

Torq

[RobA]

I seem to have been beat out on all the good points, but I'll throw in my vote for and Inkscape/GIMP combination for making maps.

And welcome aboard!

-Rob A>

[Airith]

thanks everyone, great welcome xD lots of info I couldn't find on search engines

Will probably do what Torq said, hopefully I can start doing that sometime this weekend.

Also, is CAD any good? My design class has CAD as a major part of it, ofc it's next semester but still. I know it supposedly costs a lot, teacher talked about that once, but I do get to use it for design class xD

[RPMiller]

CAD is just a generic term for a type of software. That said, yes, CAD is very good for making maps as that is the tool of most modern cartographers that aren't going for an artistic look. Applications such as AutoCAD, MicroStation, and even Campaign Cartographer are all CAD applications. The way they work is pretty much the same across the board. (I was a CAD draftsman for several years right after college - I used AutoCAD and MicroStation) So if you learn one of the CAD applications you'll have an easy time with any of them once you learn the commands.

This leads me to Campaign Cartographer 3 which you'll see many fine examples of maps made by it on this site. If you can afford it, it is much cheaper than the "big CAD" apps, you may want to consider going that route, but ultimately it depends on what you want your end result to look like. Take a look around and see which of the different apps produce the most maps that you like. That should help you decide.

[pyrandon]

CAD is a great program type for vector-based mapping (much like Inkscape & Adobe Illustrator). As you said, very expensive, but would work wonderfully for those clean-line plan type drawings. If you have access to that and need to learn it anyway, it may be worthwhile!

[Gamerprinter]

Although AutoCAD and Microstation which are the major CAD applications used in the engineering trades - its really more technical drawing than true map production, sure you can make maps, but symbol sets aren't made for the kind of maps used in most games.

That's the difference with Campaign Cartographer - it is built on a basic CAD engine, however all the coding over the last 30 years was to make more applicable to RPG map-making.

CC3 is only $39, those others are thousands of dollars each, Microstation most expensive of all. Yes they are all CAD, but CC3 and the rest are very much "apples and oranges".

I hear all the advocacy of free software, that's not me. If I pay for software, I can yell at somebody when something's wrong, not so with free software. That's not the only reason, but I don't use GIMP/Inkscape, nothing wrong with it, its just not me.

[RobA]

When was the poll added? I hadn't noticed it before.

-Rob A>

[ravells]

A while back....about a month or so...but I didn't really publicise it.

[Juggernaut1981]

As I mentioned in my September Challenge entry, when I do my maps I use a combination of AutoREALM (probably Vector?) and GIMP with a tablet laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook T Series)

Generally the process is:

#1 Stick in all the big features (land, rivers, etc)
#2 Export into JPGs the icons available in AutoREALM (because I don't know how to export the individual icons in AutoREALM so I could use them as brushes in GIMP)
#3 Build a number of layers in GIMP to deal with the different sections of the map (oceans, landscape, roads, structures, map-notes/labels)
#4 Tweak around by inserting layers and fidgeting with their interplay to get the effects I want. Fidget with colouring,etc.