Foundry Modules: The Top 5 Modules for Mapping in Foundry

[Music] hey everyone this is zephyr and welcome to the baileywiki channel we teach everyday dungeon masters how to combine technology and art to create truly amazing experiences for their players we also create scenes and modular systems that you can use without any setup with foundry virtual tabletop if you're a dm that likes to wow your players or you're using platforms like foundry vtt and dungeondraft you're in the right place subscribe to our channel and hit the bell to keep up with our content or consider subscribing to our patreon not only do you support the channel and make content like this possible but you also get access to everything that we've ever made like these sewers and temples that we're showing right now today we are counting down our top five favorite modules for making maps right in foundry these modules make creating scenes faster easier and more powerful within foundry these won't necessarily completely replace an art program such as dungeon draft or photoshop but they will allow you to use those assets more flexibly and create more scenes with less headache in foundry we take advantage of all five of these modules when we create our content and as we've just had a new release with the modular city docs and sewers and modular city temples we figured this was the best way to demonstrate just how powerful these modules are by giving you a quick look at how we use them when we make content now these modules many of them build upon each other or we use them in conjunction with each other so rather than putting this in a least to most important or impactful we're going to be presenting them in no particular order so that you can follow how we use them together and with all that let's dive right in our first module today is token attacher if you've spent any amount of time with baileywiki content you're probably a little familiar with token attacher and know how much we love it token attacher is the backbone of the modular system token attacher allows you to attach any element in foundry to a token whether that is a tile or lights or sounds or walls or even other tokens and drawings you can attach them to the token using a simple dialog box based upon your selections once you've attached things to a token when the token moves so do all of the attached elements well you might first think of this with attaching say a player token to a carriage so that they travel with the carriage we can expand that by having entire rooms like these sewer rooms and attach them to control tokens then save them as actors and assign the control tokens to those actors allowing us to have deployable rooms and buildings anywhere in our world and you'll just have to use that assign token button as i mentioned earlier in order to do that and you can save these in your actors directory or your compendiums that you can then drag out into any other scene we absolutely love this functionality and it is very powerful for allowing you to quickly make maps using modular pieces that you already have you can either use artwork from other creators such as these pieces in our new sewers release or you can create your own in dungeon draft or your map making or art tool of choice this just might inform how you can change up your workflow in order to make the most out of your time in those mapping tools if you design an inn with several different pieces then you can redeploy those rooms in the future to make several other versions throughout your game so it adds a lot of flexibility and utility we'll also notice that as we manipulate the tokens with rotations etc they will also move the elements properly our next module is a great companion for token attacher and it's dungeon draw dungeon draw allows us to paint in rooms and hallways with textures so you can see that here we have a scene that we've already built out with our different prefabs and i have these custom themes that i have defined using artwork that we included in this release we could also use some of the stock textures from dungeon draw itself and i'm able to draw in similar to the drawing tool these sections of dungeon and they're appearing below our tile layer in fact it'll appear below our scene background layer as well so you can get kind of creative with how you use it in order to add depth and dimension using just dungeon draw this is a really simple way to connect up these different rooms in these underground spaces where there's a lot of negative space between the rooms but it's kind of tedious to place in individual hallways and we can see that i've themed this together so that it looks really good in conjunction with the rest of our sewer assets dungeon draw also even adds in these extra walls for you i'm going to go ahead and get rid of the ones that i don't need as i've over extended the bounds of where my tiles are but if you were to start with using dungeon draw you could then shortcut a lot of the extra wall and door creation for yourself and you can really make your map making a lot faster we can also use a theme painter so that we can have multiple themes on the same scene so here i want to make this area in the channels of the sewer into water so i have a water theme already set up and using the theme painter it's kind of like drawing a polygon with the drawing tool and i am just going to paint around this area to define everything as going to be water and then we'll see that it will update all of the dungeon drawings within that section and so now we have this great sewer water that fits right in with our sewer tiles it's a little hard to see but we can move these monks active tile triggers out of the way you can see that flows really nicely you also don't have to use this to link between different scenes you can actually generate a dungeon using three different algorithms that are provided with dungeon draw you can adjust your height and width and this is a generic 30 by 40 scene created by foundry when we click generate is going to automatically map out all this area with these walls and doors etc and once we have that generated we can just click on our different themes and it will swap over so we're not committed to the first theme that we generate in and this is a really great looking dungeon if you don't want to think about how you're doing your layout you could keep it at just that layout or you could add in additional prefabs such as like this altar and you can then edit it to remove the excess walls that overlap with some of the dungeon draw walls i don't demonstrate it here but you can also then add additional dungeon draw space you can freely connect between the different pieces as you go this is a really powerful tool if you want to use it to create your entire dungeon or if you just want to use it in conjunction with token attacher our next module is actually a group of modules we call this the levels suite consists of levels better roofs and wall height all maintained by the ripper and what levels does is it allows us to really add some three-dimensionality here we go underneath this arch and it disappears that's not that different from boundary stock overhead tile feature but where the magic really starts to shine is when we go to this other area and we walk up some stairs i've moved our character into this bear axe here and we can see as he steps on the stairs he's actually going to go up 10 feet in the air and he's on a passageway that we couldn't see before the area below him he has explored so it's in the gray fog of war kind of effect but he's not able to see anything down there and then when we go down the other set of stairs we hop back over and this is a really simple way to add some interesting verticality and texture to this sewer map so it's not just a 2d experience it is a fully 3d experience in a way that just isn't achievable with only the foundry stock overhead tile functions and we can use this levels ui to be able to view between the different layers and this is also how you would build by placing things on those sections clicking that little arch allows us to see the roof tiles within a layer such as these arch heads again this is made possible using a conjunction of levels with wall heights and better roofs if you go to our overhead section on one of these tiles we'll see that there is a better roof mode that behaves differently there is show through the fog and you can also fade and mask to have more advanced functions while height you can see here that this wall has a top of 9 feet what that means is it's only going to obstruct movement and vision for tokens below 9 feet that way you can fly over walls or you can have again that true vertical experience where these walls lower down aren't going to obstruct us while we're moving along on these pathways so wall height is part of the bones there and switching between the layers will show you the elements on each layer individually we don't have to limit ourselves to just simple hallways over the top of sections of sewers though here we have a full nine level tower that has been constructed on a single scene without the images being tiled this is true vertical map making made possible by the level suite and we can see here using our levels ui we can navigate between each of the different levels and again this is a fully 3d scene now we don't have to tile this into several different images along the scene and have tokens move over there and we don't have to have separate scenes for teleporting between the different floors it's all there so you can have your entire party spread out across the nine floors and you can run an encounter that is a combat or something of that nature across all nine of the floors and the roof here and again this is all made possible thanks to levels if we don't have our ui open we can see all of the elements but when we had that levels ui we only saw the walls lights etc that were associated with that particular level and this gets really interesting when we combine it with token attacher like we mentioned earlier we can create a prefab out of this entire tower to drop into any scene that we want since it's pretty large it does take a bit to load in but then we can get our levels from the scene and navigate between those same 10 levels or 9 plus a roof to see the entire tower in any scene our next one is a really powerful quality of life module and that is df architect df architect adds a variety of different tools for you that make the actual walling and making of scene easier a simple one is this alternate grid snap option and as you know with walls if you turn on grid snapping it's going to snap to the vertices of the grids if we turn on this alternate is instead going to be snapping to the midpoint there's a few cases where this might be really helpful but it's mostly really nice to just have that extra option for how grid units are going to snap we can also click on this show layer on others to allow us to see where our walls are in other layers so for example if whatever reason we had to move this tile out of the way to see something that we were doing we could then still see the walls so that we could move the tile back into position precisely this is also helpful if say i want these grates to correspond with where i have this lighting and so rather than guessing i can turn on that visibility so that i can line them up properly so now when i go back to my tiles i can still see the lights and i can put those grates in the correct position and this makes a lot of different minor walling or tile placement decisions a lot easier in foundry this visibility also applies to a variety of other layers while there's not something for tokens as tokens are always visible there is a visibility toggle for the sounds as well and that makes it very useful for being able to position things precisely while we're also on the subject of moving things around precisely and some tiles there's another great feature that allows us to flatten tiles this is particularly useful for us content creators that are trying to optimize scenes so that people don't have to have as many tiles imported in their module browser but if i want to have all this elevation and their stairs in a single tile i can use this tile flattener and it's got a variety of options including the ability to have the entire background image in there or the entire canvas or toggle whether i want floor tiles or roof tiles only or hidden tiles to show up or not and i can add additional padding if i so desire on here i'm going to remove that from previous option and i can also change the file format if you're on a chromium browser you can use webp otherwise you have jpeg and png when we flatten it we have the option to name it and we have a preview and we can save it on the computer or our foundry vtt server in a configurable file location another great option is in the game settings area there's a new button called save board game image and this is kind of like that tile flattener taken to the next level here we can capture the entire canvas or only the current view or the entire canvas including the padding and similarly we have options to change our background image or the background color transparency etc and we can also filter in these different layers so if we don't want the lights and sounds to be affected we can remove that as well and that site layer will affect if you have a token selected at the time you can also reset the filter etc and this capture image is really useful if you want screenshots for something either a promotional tool or a demonstration ability hopping over to walls df architect has a lot of options here so i can actually select these walls and let's say if i want to get rid of this stair here i can move these two walls together and have them selected and there is an option to split walls and an option to join walls so we're going to join my selected walls and create a single wall right here and then i can flip the wall direction back and after that i can then re-split them if i want to remake those stairs and move things back into position so very handy when you have made a wall too long and you need to put a window in somewhere and here i'm drawing in these extra walls and i want them to be one way and we'll notice that it shows right and left on the walls indicating the directionality of the walls however this really comes in handy is when i select these and go to make them one way i already know that the wall direction is right no more guessing and getting it wrong the first time and then having to switch it back every single time it is labeled right there for you so very helpful especially when you're working with a lot of one-way walls another tool that i make a lot of use of is moving lights around normally when you move it around it'll snap to the grid and if you hold shift you can put it wherever you want the if architect adds a really nice cross here so that you can be very precise about the exact origin point of your light very helpful for putting things over a lantern in the settings you can also find a lot of other options such as changing the auto snap for the walls showing or hiding those alternate grid snap toggles and also having some different shortcuts that are available to you such as being able to quickly change your walls or swapping between your layers and those hotkeys can be configured if we go into configure controls rather than configure settings and there's a tab for df architect where you can swap quickly between different layers and also different wall types while you're doing that if you've ever played a strategy game you know that one of the best ways to improve your speed and become faster and better at the game is to make use of hotkeys and shortcuts and right here df architect is giving us those hotkeys and shortcuts to get faster better and more efficient with our map making in foundry this is a great tool it might take a little bit to get used to or find the settings that you really like but it's really useful for being able to speed up your map making as i'm sure we've all switched between layers a few too many times for our liking and having to drag our mouse over actually does add up time as we go our final module today is mullinet mullinet is a very powerful asset browsing tool for foundry there are a variety of mullinet modules and today we're just going to show off cloud and tiles and tokens clicking on the hammer we can see the submenu of all the moldnet modules but then also within my tiles i can click on the hammer to open up the malnet window there and here i'm able to index my images and this is going to index a custom folder that i have specified on my foundry install and once it's indexed then i'm going to be able to pull in those assets very quickly and intuitively from my data folder so now if i search for sewer i can see some of the pieces from the sewer adventure in the beta wiki premium module and the original modular sewer that's in the towns module scrolling down further i can get to the actual tiles that we're using here today for the modular city district that includes the sewers so now that we're down here we have all these different sewer pieces that i can drag in quickly and easily i can also search for things like trash if i want to clutter up this space and this is how we mainly use it is we set our token asset grid size just like a tile browser to 150 and we can apply a token magic fx macro in this case a shadow for a drop shadow and if i were to drag in this trash can then we will see that it has this nice little drop shadow from token magic fx so it's automatically applying that macro and if i delete that macro then it's going to come in without that drop shadow and you can change this to any other tmfx macro that you have specified the main way that we use this when we're creating content is a quick way to bring in our different tiles so i can bring in all these different trash piles that i want to use to clutter up this space and make it interesting and once i drag things in it's just like a regular tile as if i had pulled it out from my modules we'll see that there's a few duplicates and more on that in a moment about some cloud storage options but i can then drag in all of these pieces and clutter up my space and it's a lot faster to be able to search through all of my different files and folders rather than having to navigate into those folders individually so this indexes everything so when i look for barrels then it's going to pull open a different location where i can pull out these piles of barrels and crates rather than having to go back through the tile browser go up a few levels and then drill back down into a separate subfolder structure so it's very quick and easy to be able to navigate a very large amount of assets and content and that's one of the reasons why we really like to take advantage of this when we're cluttering up spaces with these smaller tile assets etc you'll also notice that there is a prefabs section and this is where we can bring in prefab assets prefabs are what we are showing off with token attacher earlier and i can drag in one of these prefabs directly over and it will import an entire independent prefab for me this is something that's only available with the cloud storage that we'll get into in just a moment but it's a really potent tool to be able to bring in prefabs for your own games we'll notice that this is getting stored inside of our mullinet folder though so if you are a content creator keep that in mind when you are constructing scenes using this kind of system but it functions exactly like a fully deployed token attacher prefab and we have a lot of options here to go through to get access to that cloud storage and those prefabs you'll need to be a patron of mullinet and here if i click on patreon i can see all the different creators that i work with and what i'm able to bring in from millinet and i just had to link that through a nice little pop out that happens when you click on link patreon and again we can see this whole list of people that work with mullinet and that you can access content from depending upon the different modules so now when i go back into my tile browser i am going to instead of filtering only bailwiki content i can switch to all creators and put in sewers and now we'll see that we have a lot of things from tom cartos and we scroll further down there's even more sewer assets from other artists so i don't have any tom cartos modules installed on this particular instance you don't have to have anything installed to access these pieces and that's one of the really great things about mullinet you can have access to all of this content without having to actually install the compendiums you don't need to worry about updates you don't need to worry about your storage space because this is only going to bring in the images that you use and save them inside of your molenet data folder that is specified right here so i'm not bringing in an entire 750 megabyte one gigabyte module like one of the larger beta wiki modules or a large array of tiles for tom cartos i'm only bringing in these individual tiles that i have used on my maps so it's really great if you are trying to keep down on your storage and malnet has a lot of great options there is not just these tiles and tokens and prefabs there's also sounds and scenes and throughout your foundry install it's a very powerful suite of tools that allows you to access your content and go through the different prefabs and other options you have available to you for your games and especially if you're running a home game where you're not packaging up content this is phenomenal it makes it very easy to drag in different art assets and add things such as interactive weapons or other pieces throughout your map without you having to hard bake them into your map and commit to that in an art program additionally even without the cloud storage option you could bring in all of your map making assets into a folder inside of your foundry installation index that and then you can map directly within foundry as if you were in something like dungeon draft by dropping in all these individual pieces and just using macros for the drop shadows to add depth to your scene so it's a very powerful way to map and add content within your scenes in foundry that's going to conclude our list of our five favorite modules for mapping within foundry as i mentioned before we make use of all of these modules when we're creating our content so i hope that really demonstrates the power of these different pieces for making mapping faster and easier in foundry and expand the capabilities of what foundry can do if you're interested in any of these showcase scenes or prefabs visit us on patreon.com bailwiki to get the latest installments in the modular city series of modules if you want to learn more about these modules individually we have tutorials on many of them they are linked in cards on the screen and you can also visit our main youtube page to view the playlists of different foundry vtt tutorials i hope that this has been interesting to you please let me know if there's any other modules for mapping in foundry that you think we've missed and should have covered and let us know what modules we should cover next this has been zephyr thanks so much for watching and have a good one you

Channel: Baileywiki

Views: 50,126

Keywords: roll20, foundryvtt, fantasygrounds, dnd, dnd5e, pf2e, pf1e, battlemap, vtt

Id: lPAHeSdbrik

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022