Reuniting the Band: Going Digital

The Plan

Until I started using Fantasy Grounds, my maps has usually been drawn freehand on either graph paper (for buildings and dungeons) or hex paper (for area maps). Most of these were simple floorplans, drawn with a mechanical pencil, though I would sometimes break out the colored pencils for area maps.

When I started the FG campaign I initially planned to simply continue drawing my maps by hand and running them through the scanner. But as soon as I tried it I could see the results were less than stellar. Here’s a sample:

As you can see, it’s a bit hard to read. I tried some postprocessing with Paint Shop Pro, but it really didn’t help. In fact, most of my attempts made it look even worse than it did to begin with.

The other problem is that the file was huge by FG standards. The full map from above was 3 MB, which is a tad large for FG. Anything I did to reduce the file size would make the map even harder to read than it already was.

Plan B

So I bit the bullet and recreated my maps in Paint Shop Pro. First I had to come up with a hex grid, since PSP didn’t have one built-in. Michelle came to the rescue on that, by using a CAD program to produce several hex overlays for me. Then for each map I had to make a copy of the overlay, and color in each hex with the flood-fill tool to produce my map. It sounds awful, but it only took an hour or two for each map, which was about the same time I had spent to do the old colored-pencil maps.
Here’s the same section of the campaign world as before, rendered digitally:

It’s still a long way from artistic, but at least you can read it. And the final file size was tiny – only 74 KB.

Next time around I’ll talk about dungeon maps. Thanks for reading!