[Award Winner ] Creating an old-school map in Gimp.

[torstan]

Okay, let's finish the walls and colour the rock around before we start putting in some furniture.

Finish laying down the lines for the wall outline as above so that your walls are a closed loop of lines, or until the lines reach the edge of the page. This will be important in a minute. You should have something that looks something like this:


Now it's quite hard to tell where the wall is and where the corridors are (okay, not too hard on this map, but on a larger map this would be tricky). We need to flood fill the wall areas to make this clearer. To do this pick the fuzzy select tool:


Make sure that sample merged is off. Now click within an area you want to fill. You should get a large area highlighted with a line of black and white 'marching ants' that should encompass the area you want to fill. If instead you get one square selected, then you've got the background layer selected rather than the Walls layer. Go to the layers dialogue and click the wals layer and try again. Now as we used the brush tool, our walls have a slightly soft edge to them. This means that the fuzzy select region doesn't quite go up to the wall lines. If we fill at this point then we'll get a thin line of white between the wall and the fill. So go to Select>Grow... and pick 2 pixels. This expands the selection to the middle of the wall lines.

Now go to Edit->Fill with foreground colour, or ctrl-, This should give you something like this:


This is starting to look a little better. Finish filling the walls in the same way.

Now we want to lay some internal walls that don't take up full 5' squares. Do this by switching back to the paintbrush tool and using the click, press-shift-and-drag, click method above to lay down internal walls. Don't worry about doors, we'll do that next.

Remember - if something goes wrong you can always hit ctrl-z to undo it.

This should give you something like this:

[torstan]

Right, I promised doors, and doors you shall have. In the original TSR maps the doors were squares. Here's an example door that I have knocked up for you:


Note that this is a 50px by 50px image so it fits the grid size I am using. You can get this for yourself by right-clicking the image->Save Image As... Place it somewhere you can find it easily.

Now when we start placing doors we'd best create a new layer. So go back to the new layer button again. Name the layer Doors and make sure it is selected.

Now go to File->Open... and find where you saved that door image that I posted above. Open this. Select all using Select->All or ctrl-A and copy using Edit->Copy or ctrl-C. Close the door image and click Don't Save when prompted - you haven't changed it anyway.

Now return to your map. Click the map window so that it has focus, and go to Edit->Paste or ctrl-V. Now you'll have a door image in the middle of your canvas. It will almost certainly be in the wring place. To move it, pick the selection tool from the toolbox:


Now if you hover the mouse over your pasted door, you'll get a little cross-hair with a little four-directional arrow on the bottom right. When you hover the mouse away from it you'll get an anchor on the bottom right. Make sure you don't have the anchor and click and drag the door image to the position you want. The grid will help to an extent, but you may need slightly finer control. If so, place it roughly, then move it into its final position using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Once it is in the right place, move the mouse until you get the anchor symbol and click to place it. You can also place it by clicking the Anchor layer button in the Layers dialogue.


Now the big square doors are all well and good, but they're not very realistic and they don't show which way the doors should open. Here's a different door that conveys that extra information. I know that's not really cricket, but it was requested in another thread, so here it is:


You can place this in just the same way as the other doors, though you will need to use the arrow keys to get the placement right.

Using these it is straightforward to do all the doors you need to place:


Note that you can rotate the images you want to lay down using the rotate tool from the toolbox. Just select the rotate tool and click the object before you anchor it. Equally you can use the Flip Tool to flip an image horizontally or vertically. I did this to get the double doors at the top of the map. Once you have manipulated the object into the orientation, go back to the selection tool to move it and anchor it.

[torstan]

You can add other items to the map in exactly the same way. Now I'm not going to draw a load of mapping icons for everyone here, but it is quite possible to find a large number of them on the dunjinni site here:
[urlhttp://www.dundjinni.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=572&KW=old+style[/url]

I couldn't find the basic Dungeoncrafter tiles anywhere, but if someone has a link, I'm sure they can post it here.

Now the dunjinni tiles are a bit large (sized for a 200px grid) so it's best to resize them. When you want to use one of those do the following. When you open it for the first time, go to Image->Scale Image. Change the units to percent and the magnitude to 25 on each axis:


This will scale the image down by 25%, from a 200px/grid size to a 50px/grid size. Now as before, select-all, copy and paste on to your map. Remember that it is probably worth setting up a new layer for each new set of furnishings.

This time when you close the image of your object, you do want to save. Go to File->Save As... before you close the file and save it as <objectName>Small.png or similar. That way you will quickly build up a library of objects that you can use that are at the right scale for your maps.

Equally, you can draw your own. This isn't too hard, but if/when you get stuck trying this, please ask around and people will be able to help you out.

Finally, you'll want to label your maps. Choose the trext tool (the large A) and start typing. If the label is in the wrong place, don't worry. Use the movement tool with the following settings:


If you click and drag on your text now you will be able to move it to wherever you like.

With these last tips you should end up with map something like this in no time:


If you want, you can add a scale in as well or you can leave those like toff guessing.

Save the .xcf version of your map again (ctrl-S), and then Save As... (ctrl-shift-S) OldSchool.jpg (or name of your choice of course), click okay on the two dialogues that come up and you have yourself a finished map!

[torstan]

And here is the same map imported into maptool, given dynamic lighting and being explored by an adventurer who found a statue with ruby eyes and decided it would be a good idea to prise one out. The statue shudders to life, an infernal glow in those ruby eyes and the hapless adventurer wishes he'd had a bit more respect for those annals of D&D history.....


Now obviously the labels shouldn't be visible to the players. That's why we kept them on another layer, so that by switching off the visibility of the layer (the little eye symbol beside the layer icon) we can hide them all. If we then save the map we get just the player view without any of the traps or secret doors visible:


Now obviously this was a light hearted tutorial harking back to a more innocent time of D&D, but the basic principles you've seen here are the same basic principles that go into making far prettier maps. The core of this is getting a good selection and finding a nice way to fill it. Clearly instead of using blue for your flood fill, you could use one of Gimp's built in textures - such as the granite texture. Suddenly you have a very different type of map. Something in fact that looks a little more like this:


But something like that is really something for another tutorial - and one by someone else as I need to get some dinner. Please feel free to ask any questions, or make comments - I will endeavour to answer them as best I can, or someone else here who is better qualified will be able to. I notice a couple of people have already chipped in with some very pertinent hints further up the thread. Thanks guys!

Oh, one final thing. Please star rate this thread with an honest rating for how useful this was. This will help other users see which threads are useful and which are not.

[töff]

harking back to a more innocent time of D&D

Burgers and fries and cherry pies! Things were simple and good back then. (You know the song.)

Very nice tute. Makes me want to learn whether I can give out rep.

[torstan]

I'm glad you liked it. And I did wonder who would jump on the diagonal corridors - they really are an aberration.

[McDeath]

I will have to try this. When i get a chance i will copy the tutorial down.

[jfrazierjr]

And here is the same map imported into maptool, given dynamic lighting and being explored by an adventurer who found a statue with ruby eyes and decided it would be a good idea to prise one out. The statue shudders to life, an infernal glow in those ruby eyes and the hapless adventurer wishes he'd had a bit more respect for those annals of D&D history.....

Heh... All töff has to do is run back into that 7(3??) foot wide corridor, and that big hugh monster can't get to him.

Joe

[Ghalev]

Bravo. A question, though (my GIMP-fu is nonexistent): can the Gimp provide this map with a bit of finishing stress? As it is, it looks very aggressively digital ... perfectly-sharp/crisp lines, symbols and labels.

In Photoshop, this could be amended pretty easily in the middle stages with a bit of screened noise, a soft blur, and a re-firming of the "spot ink" by adjusting the contrast - voila. What would be (if you have time) the comparable procedure for those of us just getting our toes wet in Gimp?

[torstan]

My guess is that it can, I'm just not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve. Could you post a before and after version of the photoshop effect and I'll see if I can patch together the same result in Gimp. I think I know what you're getting at but I'm not 100% sure.