Dungeondraft Ship Map Tutorial

great since cameraman toe and today we're going to be showing you how to make a ship in Dungeon Draft I'm a huge fan of Dungeon Draft and I've made a couple of different videos on the program in the past but one of the most requested tutorials people wanted to see was making a ship battle map so that's what we're gonna be doing here today so without any further ado let's head over to the computer and get started so here we are in Dungeon Draft and we're ready to get started the first thing that we want to do is we want to fire up a new map and choose our page size I'm gonna go with a 40 inch TV just to start with to get an idea of how large that's gonna be I think that will probably do as we might want it a little bit longer because we're gonna be making a reasonably large ship so we'll bump that up to 45 tiles wide by maybe 30 tiles that's more like it plenty of room there now there's a couple things that we need to do before we get started we need to make sure we know a few things a lot of this process making a ship in Dungeon Draft relies on the layer tool we're going to be using different layers to add different elements and get them to interact in different ways for our final map so you want to be familiar with the layer tool in Dungeon Draft and the other big thing that we need to know how to do is how to make curved walls which is one of the things that trips a lot of people that when they get dungeon draft and they're trying to make new maps so I'm gonna really quickly show you how to do that we're gonna grab a wooden wall here we're gonna zoom in and the way to do it is we start off choose us that in location left click which will start drawing our wall and then hold down shift which will change the color as you can see and we can drag that around and while our does is it creates a thing called a spline which is a curved section and we can change the degree to which its curved so if we want a little bit of a curved wall we drag it out to there that go shipped double click it will put our wall in now throughout the process you'll see me use a lot of curved walls and it's kind of essential for making a ship map being able to use character walls so make sure you comfortable with that left click to start and then hold down shift and hold down click and drag around your spline then let go of shift let go of your left mouse button and then double click to finish it if you want to connect to you start it hold down shift drag where you want to be let go of both it will let you then move your cursor where you want the new one go back to where you started hold down shift drag it out in exactly the same way double click and that's how we're gonna build the walls for this ship another thing we need to keep in mind is save often don't Draft is still in early access and as such it's not the most stable that it could be and we will almost certainly run into crashes throughout this process and we want to save often and make sure that we keep everything up to date so we're ready to dive in and the first thing I like to do is get my layers sorted I want to decide how many layers I want this map to be and get them all in place to begin with so our bottom layer the bottom most layer is going to be our water and we're gonna have nothing on this except our water then the next layer up we're gonna have our below deck then our main deck and upper deck and the sails basically so we've got three decks the water the sail five total layers so I want to make those layers right at the start so we go over to the layers tool and we're just gonna create a bunch of new layers over the ground here so the first thing we want to do after we've sewed our layers head to the ground layer so we're going to come down here select the ground layer and then we're going to go over to our water tool select the square option change our color to the more blue tones and then we're just gonna draw in a whole layer of water and we don't want to do everything after this layer at this point so we're gonna hit save save early saved often and then we're gonna switch on up to the below deck now I'm gonna leave below deck blank for now I want to work on the main deck first because that's going to be the the main part of the map that the players interact with and that's going to determine the size of our ship which will inform how big our lower deck and our epic ask so we're gonna head up to the main deck layer then we're gonna hit compare layers and choose our reference level our reference level is the ground and we want to turn the opacity all the way up on the reference level and all the way up on our comparing level on our main deck level this allows us to see the water without interacting with it so again I'm gonna make sure I'm saving really frequently because dungeon draft is still early access so it is likely to crash and we can get started making our ship the first thing that we want to do is we want to get a basic shape a basic outline now for this I've gone and looked up some blueprints of other ships of real-world ships just to get an idea of how they look and I found this of the rotor low a 1597 vessel and I like the shape of it so that is what we're going to use today or an approximation of it at least so you can see here we've got a nice reasonably square back and then it tapers outwards and then in words at the front so if we look at our map here we want maybe five squares back 25 feet at the back the best thing to do here is we can count our squares so our bottoms greatest 30 squares we want to get up to 15 and go through the central 5 makes it a little bit awkward let's make it six squares at the back so we're going to grab our wall tool select our wooden wall find the number 15 down at the bottom right here you'll see the grid positions get into number 15 and then gonna go down 6 from there now I want to spline this ever-so-slightly only a little bit like that and what I'm gonna do very first of all is I'm just gonna really roughly put the walls in I'm not going to connect them I just want to get a rough idea of the shape test out the shape of the ship make sure it's the right size I know where I want to place things how I want to curve my splines doing this means that I can go back and make a refined version later so switching back to my reference I can see then that we come out nice and wide up to the front and then we've got a little bit here so I think up to about 34 is probably gonna be good so get to 34 and then we want to spline it so we'll come out by three squares and I want my spline to be four squares away from the endpoint so again place that do the same on the other side hold for a spline and we want to come out by three squares and over by four squares double click that and then we can make the front of the ship the prowl for that I'm gonna choose my endpoint again create a spline and I'm gonna curve this one inwards by 1 square and do that and then again I want to come in woods by a single square and then check the positioning track the shape see if we're happy with everything so looking at the front here I can see that the spine at the front is off-center that's not a problem all we need to do is go in and this is why I've put separate walls to start with so that we can go in and we can make those adjustments so I come in here and make sure that we want to go to number 15 so we want to go to there and then again spline we want to curve it inwards so we'll go from the point in to do the same from here create a create our spline like this and then we curve inwards by two and I'm pretty happy with the shape of that overall I think we could go a bit bigger though so I will remake this that's slightly larger so we've got the outline of the ship the next step is to add the floor to do this we go over to the floor shape tool we're gonna select the polygon tool we're gonna choose no wall as our option and then we're gonna follow the exact same process following around the shape that we've just made to fill in of the floor of the main deck which gives us our deck now from here we can go and start adding details but the first thing that I want to do is figure out where our top deck is gonna be so to do that I'm gonna grab the wall tool again grab the wooden wall and we're just going to partition off part of this ship so we're going to drag it back here we're gonna just drag off this section this whole back section is going to be our upper floor so now what we want to do is we want to go to the upper deck and we want to compare the upper deck with the main deck like so and we hit ok now I want the upper deck of this ship if we look here it looks like the upper deck is a little bit bigger a little more grand than our rear deck then our middle deck our main deck that's a lot of decks so the way we're gonna do this is we're gonna just slightly increase the size so we're going to go to out to across and make another layer for our deck we're going to see how that looks so that gives us our main deck at the rear that we can then work on so we're going to abandon the upper deck for now and we're gonna go back down to the main deck which is where most of our work is going to take place so again save to make sure that we're saving often and if we encounter a problem like I have now where we can't compare levels just switch levels then we're gonna compare it with the ground again just because I like being able to see the water I think it makes it look nicer so what we want to do now is we've got an idea of what our main deck looks like we put our upper deck we want to go down to our below deck and we want to compare that with our main deck and we want to drop the reference opacity so then we want to go in and add our lower level now I'm gonna make that smaller then our main deck to represent that wasting of the middle of the ship and once we've done that we can go straight on to detailing and with our lower deck done it's time to work on the sails now I like to do this before I start adding detailing just that I can do all my detail in in one nice pass so we're gonna jump up to the upper deck for a moment we're going to compare levels with the main deck so that we can see where our masts are and the more I look at it the more I don't like this floor so we're gonna grab this hold down alt and we are just gonna hold down alt actually alt instead of control and we're just gonna delete that deck and instead we're gonna build a new one just ever so slightly bigger that's a little bit better that's less exaggerated but now we're on the upper deck we've got the reference of our main deck we can add our final sale or our final master lease so we're going to the object tool we grab that slightly smaller mask we make sure snapping is turned on with s we line it up and we place it so now on our ship we'll have two smaller sails one at the front and one at back and then our Bigham mainsail add in the sails is what we're gonna do next so we're gonna go up to the sails deck navigate up to the sails deck and we're gonna compare that first with the main deck we're gonna drop the opacity of the main deck a little bit and then we're gonna grab a sail we're gonna grab the biggest sale that we've got that's still not big enough so we want to up the scale up that's who and then we're gonna spin that around here you can see that that's already got a must so we don't actually need to add a master of our own we just want to make sure that everything is nice and square on and then we place our master down then we grab our smaller sail here and we're gonna place that there like that well we will if it will place there like that and then turn off compare levels compare it to the upper deck and do the same thing but now with our sails down it's time to start detailing and this is one of the funnest parts of the whole process at least for me you get to go wild and add in all your little details so we head over to the object tool still with our ship option selected you can see that we've got a whole bunch of different options we've got hammocks we've got anchors we've got little wheels and port like hatches sails all that kind of thing and then we can keep adding details the first very first thing that I want to do is I want to add in some stairs up to that upper level so I'm going to change my scale back down to one and I'm gonna grab a couple of staircases spin around here like this I'm going to place a few staircases going up to that upper level and then as we are on the main deck this rear portion can be the captain's quarters and cabin so we'll grab the door tool and we'll select our doors and we'll zoom in here and place our doors for the captain's cabin so what I'm gonna do now is I am gonna go through this whole ship and make it look fancy and and all of the different options and I'll come back once I've added everything and we can talk about how you export this while I'm working away on this I just want to give you a quick update we passed 10,000 subscribers last week which is absolutely bonkers and I am so grateful for each and every one of you that has subscribed there's a lot of exciting things coming including merch I am wearing a piece of Icarus games merch if I just spin around here you can see it's got the logo on the back and on the front it's got this party of adventurers and it says the party that slays together stays together this is one of the merch options that is now available the link to that is in the description below so if you haven't checked that out already please do go and give it a look and here we have a Finnish map you can see that I've gone around and added a whole bunch of details on the main deck here we've got some lifeboats various cannons a plank for someone to walk the plank some hatches to lower Goods down into the cargo hold and then in this back section here we've got the captain's quarters we've got an office a little bath area and a dining table for the captain to dine with some of his favorite crew members and then the captain's bedroom up top here we've got the top deck with the wheel I don't know the technical term the wheel for the boat more weapons and more lifeboats and then if we go down below decks we've got where the crew would sleep and then that cargo hold this filled with an assortment of items so when it comes time to export we've got a couple different options we can export each layer relative to other layers or we can export each layer individually and then use a third party program to stitch them all together so if we wanted to use the export function and keeps them the layers together we hit export we could choose the ground as our source level and the main-deck as our overlay level and you can see that that it will put the main-deck over the water for us to export out if we wanted to do it as level by level we could choose the ground to be the main level and we would just export that at a high resolution and then we export each of the other ones as a PNG at lower resolutions which is what I'm going to do so we're going to start off with the ground level we're going to choose maybe 150 pixels I don't want to go absolutely huge but 150 pixels in good so we will export that and we'll call that water and then that will export out it will show us our water and then we can use that to stitch together the rest of the map so we want a turn off show of folder on finished and then we're gonna go deck-by-deck choosing PNG and we're going to change the size to b-roll 20 so we're just gonna hit export and we're gonna go below deck like that and then go up to the main deck export that as a PNG we requite main it deck and then we will finish off by grabbing the upper deck and exporting that upper deck and we will do the sails as well because why not so we'll export that as sails the next thing we want to do is wanna jump into some sort of image editing software you could use Photoshop for this paint will work I'm gonna use serif page plus because it's what I always use so a load up page plus here and then bring all these images together and after dragging our images in you can see here that I've got our water layer at a much higher resolution so I've increased the size of that and made it the background and then we're just going to go in and grab the individual layers and what I can do is I can rotate them around and we can have this break down view of the map so I can place the elements like this so that we could give this map use this map for our players and have all three of the decks visible for play if we wanted to instead drag over the different decks on top of one another grab the sails rotate them and put them on top of one another as well and get a complete boat look or I can drop the transparency of the sails so they still appear but we can see what's beneath them and use those in different ways this is why I like export in the different levels as their own images so that I have more control in post I'll run a complete image of this map across the screen now seeing get a good look at the final result but I am really pleased with this and hopefully this is giving you a good indication of how you can use dungeon dress to make ship maps I really hope that you've enjoyed this video and it's given you some inspiration for the kinds of maps that you can make in dungeon draft I'd love to see some examples of the kinds of things that you've made down in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video please give it a like as always because it really helps tell our overlords at YouTube that this video is worth putting in front of other people but until next time happy gaming thanks for watching if you're new here make sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date with all my new releases I release new videos every other Friday you'll find more videos just over here and if you enjoy what I do please consider supporting me on patreon just five dollars a month gets you access to loads of extra content to use in your RPG campaigns but until next time happy gaming

Channel: Icarus Games

Views: 10,221

Keywords: Dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeonsanddragons, rpg, dnd organization, d&d organization, dnd campaign organization, d&d campaign organization, dungeon master, game master, onenote campaign dnd, tutorial, “Icarus miniatures”, “Icarus Games”, tabletop gaming, tabletop, boardgame, dmtips, OneNote DM, DM Bible, dnd 5e, D&D 5e, onenote dm bible, Anto, dungeondraft, dungeondraft tutorial, dungeondraft ship, dungeondraft ship tutorial, dungeon draft, wonderdraft tutorial

Id: -3hLtw1Ab4k

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Icarus_Miniatures]

Happy Friday y 'all

Since I did my first review on dungeondraft folks have asked me to put something together for ships, and I finally got around to it this week.

I'm curious how other people handle actually playing on ship maps though? Do you export each image individually and use them like that? Or do you stich them all together like I did?

Much love
Anto

[u/wurgy42]

Awesome! My party is looking to go after the Uncivil Serpent in Descent so needed a ship battle map. Thanks!!

[u/redraspusrpg]

Great stuff! Your review was one of the first I saw and partially convinced me to purchase Dungeondraft -- I'm now on my sixth Dungeondraft video for YouTube myself! I've got both your videos in a big Dungeondraft playlist, along with Encounter Library's stuff, Megasploot, my own, and whatever else I've found -- here's the link, maybe you can suggest some other folks to check out... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-Tf9mHtEjDp1sQxuOczuNligHAvBJVeb -- again, great tutorial!