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Saturday, June 25, 2011

Dungeonographer in Action

I've said before that I am a terrible mapper. By that, I mean both that I'm not very adept at drawing maps nor at designing them, though I have gotten better at the latter. As to the former, Dungeonographer seems like it might be able to solve that problem. Below is a rendition of the dungeon from "The Ruined Monastery," which appeared in issue #1 of Fight On! three years ago. I was able to whip it up in fairly short order and without much difficulty, neither of which I'd have expected, given past attempts to use dungeon mapping software.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased. I'll probably try my hand at something more complex in the next few days.
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7 comments:

  1. AnthonyJune 25, 2011 at 11:08 PM

    That's pretty good for an early effort, and better than what I would achieve by hand. I'm been working with Campaign Cartographer, but that has a steep learning curve. I might want to give this a look, too.

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  2. Il Male™June 26, 2011 at 4:10 AM

    I suggest you to take a look to the One Page Dungeon feature built-in Dungeonographer and also available in the free version. You're having a blast :D

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  3. Roger G-SJune 26, 2011 at 7:03 AM

    Not sure Dungeonographer can handle angled corridors ... too bad, I really like Hexographer.

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  4. Greyhawk GrognardJune 26, 2011 at 5:03 PM

    Roger, depending on how you create the walls, Dungeonographer can do angled lines no problem. Just use one of the various "snap to vertex" walls in either of the two line/wall pallets, and you can have walls that go at any angle, not just 45 degrees or along the orthagonals.

    I'm a huge fan of both Dungeonographer and Hexographer.

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  5. JoeJune 26, 2011 at 6:34 PM

    Thanks Joseph!

    To do angled corridors, one would first make any square with a portion of the corridor the floor color/tile texture of choice. Then draw your walls at the angle using the point-to-point drawing.

    Then go to the "Shapes" tab and create a "stone-filled" (or whatever color your filled in areas are using the color chooser) polygon with no border to cover the partial hexes that have a floor and should be filled.

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  6. Greyhawk GrognardJune 26, 2011 at 8:23 PM

    Joe, any chance of seeing a tutorial on the site on how to do classic blue dungeon maps? The tutorial on how to do the Darlene Greyhawk-style map was inspirational, and is what drew me to Hexographer in the first place.

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  7. JoeJune 26, 2011 at 10:10 PM

    The plan for that is to just have it as an export option when saving a line art version. That's long been on my to-do list, but I haven't gotten to it. A interim work-around is to save the map when the classic style map icons are set, then open it in GIMP (for example) and using their color-shifting feature. (Colors menu, Hue-saturation option, but other menu items there can do the same effect.)

    If you're using Dungeonographer you're probably trying to minimize going to other more complex/general purpose tools like GIMP, but it is a pretty simple/easy thing and hopefully I'll get the feature added soon. There have been two other reminders about it in the past week, so I'll try to bump it up my list.

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