Hello Everyone

[Cebrion]

I heard about this site from Anna a while ago, who some people may know from her World of Greyhawk mapping project.

As with many gamers, I've been scribbling maps on graph paper since the age of 10 or so. Only in the last 5 years have I seriously begun to mess about with any graphics programs, mainly as I didn't have any until then.

Well, that isn't entirely true. I did have one program that was simple enough for even me to use, and that was the dungeon mapper included on the AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM(and its expansion perhaps). There is also a world mapper inlcuded, but the learning curve on it was too much for me. So I used that for a while to make full sized 1" gridded battle maps for my adventures.

After many more years I got hold of Photoshop, and started to mess around with that. At first I simply wanted to become familiar with the tool sets and how things worked. At this point, I'd estimate that I am familiar with about 75% of the features, though I certainly haven't practiced using even these. A basic college course in Photoshop would likely teach me many simple yet useful things(I'll have to look into that). Now I just need to figure out Illustrator and Indesign to the point that I am comfortable with them.


I next picked up a copy of Fractal Mapper 6.0, but never really got into figuring out what made it tick. Then I was at GAMA(The Game Manufacturers Association), an industry convention in Las Vegas, when the folks from Fluid first showed up with Dundjinni and was intrigued by their printed map samples. The deep full color look very much appealed to me, and after a brief working demo of the program I was convinced that I wanted it. I ordered a copy a few weeks later. This program is about as simple to use as it can get, which for tech-tard like me is a good thing! After messing about with Dundjinni for only a short time, I saw the potential in combining its ease of use and initial image library with Photoshop, and I was off and running...

Attached is a pic of the first map I did using both Dundjinni and Photoshop. I learned an awful lot about how NOT to do certain things during the course of making this map, and ended up spending much more time on it that was necessary. Overall it was a very positive learning experience, and that is of course the whole point of it- you just have to dive in there and do it.