How to create a map 101 using Wonderdraft

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi guys welcome to the oh updates available apparently welcome to the avanovus live stream my name is dan i'm back after a three month's hiatus um had a little surgery had a little medical issues all fun stuff went at malwarebytes i appreciate it but not right now um this is gonna be how to create a fantasy map 101 this is some videos i made about three years ago through four years ago and um we got a lot better at this of streaming so i wanted to show exactly how we get from ms paint to something like this this is a map i have just got done with we're making a gadgeteer for it big old atlas available soon so this is basically the process i use we're going to be using ms paint of all things today and we're also going to be using wonder draft so let's get started here also it looks like facebook i'm streaming to facebook twitch and youtube but it looks like facebook is not getting anything so that's that oh hey puppet master how are you doing good to have you here again this live stream so we'll be interacting with chat and let's get started so what i'm going to do with ms paint here is i'm going to create kind of a grid that helps with tangents that helps with things looking good and again this is kind of an artsy fartsy thing but it works i'm going to select this uh if you've never been in ms paint it's ridiculously simple but ridiculously powerful when copying paste and graphics i'm going to first start out with yield straight line i'm going with gray i'm going to hold down the shift key start in the middle and create a line find the middle here click hold down shift find there we're going to be using this to create a land that is not symmetrical that is balanced on paper and that's really catching to the eye what we're going to do now is we're going to divide all of these again you don't have to be accurate it helps though but again holding down shift drawing a line drawing a line the more of these lines you have the bigger your map is going to be we're going to split these one more time as such and then we're going to be zipping over to wanderdraft and using this as a template all right here we go almost there once we get done we have kind of a game to play we're again going to be just using a pencil brush make it red let's go with a paintbrush that's easier to see you know whatever line size big now the game we're going to play is we're going to be making marks on this to show where the land goes but we can only have two marks that are sharing a common border like that so i can make one mark here and one mark here but i can't make one mark here puppet master totally understand about thanks for joining in with what you're you know with the wi-fi and stuff yeah uh things things are going things are interesting um i'm going to try to stream more because i like it there's been some things that's prevented me from doing it but no soft stories on my channel so let's go ahead and get started with this and again the rules x can be like that and then i can't pull one here i can't put one here so i have to go to the side okay i remember that so i think i'm going to start actually over here i'm going to put our first x here first x here and then because i can't put there's two here linked together i can't put one there i can't put one there but i can't put one here and i think i'm going to come up here and put two here right here i'm gonna put two here actually i'm gonna yeah there then we're gonna come down right here and we're gonna create something like that then let's go ahead and go over here so what i'm doing is i'm creating kind of a balanced map that's interesting by not making big old pieces together x here and we'll come up oh let's get rid of that x we'll do one here and then one there all right so again make a grid put x's wherever you want and again two x's can only touch horizontal uh horizontal or vertical and after two x's you have to put one to the side or do something else like that we can put something let's put something right there that feels better all right over here we're looking at stuff and i think i put x there and again just crazy crazy little things kind of you know generate something that we like we don't have to do this but i'm going to uh the result of this is of course oh i closed it so no worries we're going to save this onto our desktop we're going to save it it's as alarm stream map it's png all right let's go ahead and close that we don't really need to save it now we're in wonder draft we're going to make just a standard size painting my width is 3600 pixels my height is 2400 pixels and not really a template just gonna go with this again this is the new version of uh wonder draft 1.16 a lot of new features that you really need to check out okay here's opening screen to wonder draft uh to bring that image in we're going to go to overlays and we're going to hit this like 3d hamburger button i guess it's like layers and inputs we're going to select select a trace image and we're going to find that we're going to find this guy here all right now we're going to scale it up we don't want the edges touching so we're going to scale it up to right there that's all we need and we're going to start making land again when we're making land we want to have the very biggest the very biggest uh brush so again it's this key this actually makes land this one raises land and lowers land and this creates just a little coloring and stuff like that we're going to use our brush right now and we're going to go big and for each of these squares we're going to add blob land then we are going to play with a big brush connect the dots how you connect the dots is totally up to you so this does create kind of an interesting landform come up here and you know what what the heck we're going to go right there and these guys are going to be together so you can kind of see how that works and again once we have the basic shape we can go in and mess with it let's go ahead and take that the overlay out so we're back in overlay down at the hamburger buttons we're gonna hit clear then go back up to land again i'm gonna make things big then we're gonna edit small all right maybe no no no let's let's not go too much now we're going to go up to the land to raise it we're going to make brush size pretty big but we want our roughness down about right here now the roughness on this brush the raised land right here will create little scraggles of land and stuff like that if it's really rough see if i can zoom in we get kind of that if it's not rough we get this kind and this is what we want for our edges of our map let's go ahead and control z those out of there upper roughness just a little bit just kind of eyeball there we go we want kind of a craggly coast and i'm just throwing it down where i feel like it again wonder dress a really good program probably at the end of this we'll look at some of the features we're only going to go about an hour with this stream the very most also we're almost up to 500 and let's get a little bit bigger on the brush size we are almost up to 500 subscribers i cannot believe that i am so grateful that 500 people kind of find this interesting and takes their times to watch my videos i am very grateful for that all right so we're getting there let's yeah we're as big as let's get that a little bigger again i'm just using mouse notepads anything like that and i'm going to draw big and edit small and you know looking up here let's go ahead and connect these two let's go get our brush again i'm just going to connect these i have a cool little map here oops started getting small and we are still working on the coast and what i'm doing with mouse right now i'm pulling away from the coastline to create little peninsulas we got this inner big old inner sea thing going on too kind of like that i'm gonna raise that a little bit but again i'm not doing much i'm just kind of eyeballing it but that grid pattern makes it so that we get interesting landforms and at the same time it's balanced and we don't have tangents meaning mass too close to each other now up here let's go ahead and i'm just adding some islands maybe some let's go ahead and reduce brush size let's get some little pocket islands here on these there we go all right not too bad not too bad now we're going to start editing and again we edit small and we're going with not the racer but the lower land right here we just start getting into it now sometimes like right now i see a face forget what that's called but i don't want that because other people will see a face in that now going up here let's kind of make this a little bit more interesting and i'm almost thinking yeah let's re-edit that let's not make those too close together i'm kind of following the squares and again that's fine you can do whatever the heck you want with your maps also a big shout out to the facebook communities there's like uh mapmaker community and the role playing community the the game master dungeon master community again i'm just same technique bringing stuff in now we're going to go and compare this to our little sketch we did back to overlay back to our channels it's going to make me select my see not too bad but i connected these it kind of upset the pattern and i don't want to upset the pattern but again you do whatever you want all right get more into this now we're in the principles of again land what these buttons do on the side first of all you have your landmass wizard that'll create something we don't want to hit that uh your landmass brush your eraser brush your rays land and lower land and then you have your ground color brush okay we're going to move to ground color now and kind of plan out where this map is let's go ahead and change the theme too and once you're in to wonder draft you have a little button right here called theme it gives you a lot of cool choices i'm already in eastwood on what you want to paint we have adventure there's a black and white eastward that's the one we started on feudal which i kind of like a lot imagination this is what i i really like because of the clarity of it paper pastel terra and this is warren all right let's go ahead and go back let's go to adventure this one's fun and what we're going to do is kind of plan out actually i see something i need to change just looks like a piggy for some reason so we're just going to get rid of the faces there we want people focus on what's in the land and not the land itself well in a sense all right so let's go ahead and plan this out again we're in the land we're going to the brush it gives us some brush options these are okay we'll make our own though yeah looks like facebook is having a stroke again we're going to go brush size now the brush will only do the land so what we're going to do is let's go ahead and start with our temperate landform here this is the this is the warm summers cold winters and then we're going to go a little hotter i'm going to use this this next color it suggests to show where that is once i'm done with that we're going to go to this brush this color right here let's go with this color so it shows up and this is going to be our hot arid area again we could reverse this and you know kind of go a little crazy on that that's fine dang it mess that up so we kind of had know where things are and force our once we have that let's go ahead and start throwing stuff down and then we'll color it we'll blend it make it look pretty nice once we get the land and everything else because well the symbols and everything else because some of the symbols we're going to use are change to depending on the color we're going to use let's look at symbols now i've clipped on symbols first of all we have our custom symbols bridges again this comes with a 1.6 version of wonder draft so the very latest we have trees we have forests we have little land things black and white castles uh little you know things like this the water or wherever and that's fine we're down here we have additional stuff we have rocks waterfalls stones these are kind of cool i haven't seen these before that's neat i like those we'll play with those little desert town black and white pumpkins trees well those are hay bales and since a long time ago wonder draft has definitely made improvements um with getting a lot more symbols so it's my only one of my only source spots with wunderdraft is this number of symbols okay our next symbols is our vegetation it's only one page these give kind of an interesting you know very variable well they vary in the shape of the trees stuff like that if you notice they will change colors and that's why i put the colors down first so yeah i it's kind of a fun one we might do that usually by default is like this guy here or this guy it's kind of like the scraggly yeah that one there for for us we'll come back and play with those later next is our land and again i have preference they've added some like desert stuff probably use some clouds that look cool some kind of crazy uh let's see those would be chinese calligraphy please correct me if i'm wrong some more mountains the ones i like to use are these right here because of the pencil design but that's just my personal preference all right let's go ahead and use the mounts to kind of figure out where things are so we are first going to choose the big mountains here and these are going to be pretty much the i'm going to call them the spine we are going to reduce their size to about i don't know let's go ahead and and let's go ahead and go for these big mountains 25. now we're looking at g well we can go into geology we can figure out you know fault lines and everything else like that but for this for this little demonstration we're just going to throw mountains wherever the heck we please and i think i want my first mounds i kind of want to be here when i first do the big mountains or the spine of the mountains i just do little circles like that we're here more little circles more little circles there now right here we are going to put just a really big craggly mountains kind of separate this arid area and down here i don't want that separate so we're only going to do some little mountains in between there nothing big again this is all with a mouse no fancy pads or anything like that this one we're just going to make a couple maybe a couple on the islands this will draw on the ocean so just be aware of that just be careful make this a little desert area a little scragglier all right that's not too bad all right next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to our smaller mountains and we're going to zoom in by holding control clear smaller mountains and we just go we go instead of round and go sideways with these as such notice they're creating a little bit of variance but it does feel like an actual mountain range just not just a line of mountains so i'm just going to do that up here again going side to side kind of went too big with that your mouse wheel will make these will increase the size so just be aware of that but i have a little note pad here and when i put something in just make a note of it all right let's go up to these mountains same thing not too many these don't need much let's raise it to 20. oh get in makes it a little more neat that's a little more interest the reason we're doing mountains first is that that's going to kind of tell us where our rivers are and nothing fancy we're not going to go into the hardness of ground cover we're just going to make a map that we want to again we're only going to stay in artrage here i mean not outrage but wonder draft but if you're in a game and need to turn something out fast this is the way i do it all right so we got some really cool mountains let's just kind of add a little couple here and there just for fun but we're doing pretty good on this the next step is we're going to actually start blending our paint so we're here on land we grab our brush we're going to go kind of with the same color so we'll start the screen but instead of what we did before because if we did that it's just going to mash everything we are going to just put a basic well this all this noise here we're going to drop the opacity really really low let's check out 15 oh that's even too much velocity down okay there we go and what we're going to do is we're just going to come here and little circles down in this yellow area kind of along the coast that little noise was wonder draft saving it scares the crap out of me every time now we're going to come back to this area and whoops around color we're just going to add the same this kind of brown color but we're going to put it go ahead up the opacity there a little bit more we're going to run this color up into the mountains it's middle color to show there's kind of a climate all difference not too much but these are just going to highlight our mountains now we're going to come down with this with this orange and do the same thing well let's make this a little smaller what we're going to do we're going to run this up here onto these mountains and shrine a little bit of climate change overall it's going to run our yellow brush up into these areas now i'm switching colors now just so we can get a little better kind of a variety for the mountains down in the down in this airline i'm gonna go with this brown definitely keep that keep that a little smaller it's kind of dark in the mountains a little bit let's play with it the colors they provide you with wonder draft um they give you some for each different style they um they give you colors that work it's kind of hard making your own color so you know what we're not even gonna worry about with this again opacity down velocity at one kind of want these colors to kind of run together go through the screen right here yeah i think up here around the coast maybe something like this just play with it get a feel for it okay we got our land we got our colors and let's go ahead and now do our we're gonna work on our water we're gonna start making some rivers rivers they are going to start small they're going to go bigger let's go ahead and play with that it's kind of a big river let's go with two all right that's good rough no let's go three roughness i like rough waters yeah there we go okay so we're gonna start in the mountains let's start like right here let's see this is a giant canyon and start small then it gets big and you want to end it in the water two double clicks and you can see it it's a little small so let's go with a let's go with a five cut the difference and let's go with a four oops watch that we're gonna meanders fine we won't get into these we're just making this size start over here it's just going to go down and let's say it's eroded there now we're going to get some tributaries into this like that maybe we have another one this is really wet up here there we go we're kind of like that let's come down here do the same thing again rivers have tributaries that always well for the most part unless very weird circumstances happen this happens in real life i like that river let's just keep it here sometimes let's go here sometimes you'll see something like this on a map that there's a add up to four sometimes you'll see something like this on a fantasy map okay this is very rare it does happen but it's very rare now deltas let's say we're making a delta here deltas will start like this and near the very end you'll start getting these um start getting these uh bifurcations okay but that's only when you get into the delta and it's worn down the land so if you're making a lake or rivers that yes this be careful with that it doesn't it's really rare it does happen especially in china in southern china and like parts of the danube just be aware that you know that might not be the best choice again it's your map i think we're going to do a delta right here now that i think of it so we'll just kinda there we go and we are gonna give this a lot of tributaries here everyone here now we are going to talk about rain shadows a little bit weather will flow usually will be dictated by a jet stream and that jet stream usually runs in north america it's going to be running from east from excuse me west to east in other parts of the world it runs uh east west but we're going to assume that it runs west to east on this map we'll get into that a little bit later i'm putting the majority of the rivers on this except for right here of course on the west side the east side for flavor but the west side is going to be the wet side of stuff because the rain clouds are going to come in they're going to heat these hit these mountains and in order for them to go up they have to dump their rain so it's like the mountains are giant now clouds are like a giant sponge and the mountains are squeezing all that water out of them all right all right we got our rivers in let's get some more down here again we're not going to worry about pressure zones or anything like that we're just going to get a fun little map here all right so let's go ahead into our symbols we're going to start placing our forests and let's go ahead and what let's do let's get a look at our forests a little swamp thing going on there let's leave these colored ones yeah let's go with those a little bigger the bigger it is the easiest to place we're gonna go 30. cool holding down to control to zoom in zoom out and we're going to start here just remember our trees will cover the will cover the forests i mean they'll cover the lakes so we want to kind of avoid that i'm just going back and forth we could let's up the placement rate to something there we go really fast again we don't want to cover those i want to cover those rivers and again your force are going to be on the west side of the mountains since that's the way the clouds are moving sometimes you'll get like pressure from northern climates or southern climates that usually causes like crazy weather but for our everyday things we're just going to be doing this placing on the west side some big old forests i'm leaving the east side a little barren for now we'll get some other things there all right can't say about this now the rain shadow doesn't mean there's forests not on the other side but generally they're going to be not as dense so if you if you have a if you really want a forest to be semi-realistic and again you don't have to you can always just do what you want but you might want to if your rain shadow is in a location you might want to plan out where that's going to be all right that's good for that side let's kind of go into that side now let's say there's some forest that kind of creeps down here oh spray white right went yeah we're at 40. there we go of course there forced here by these mountains first got the same thing with any maps we're working with symbols and is communicating the location and distance from certain things now we kind of have a savannah here so let's go ahead and you know do a couple little little trees and stuff nothing big i don't want to change the style of the forest because i don't want to get into that so we'll just keep this symbol for the forests all the way along here got a big old giant that big old giant forest here let's make this huge there we go and again throw them where you like hardwood wallet will always usually be in moisture so you're dealing with a cypress tree or something like that all right same thing over here not too bad not too bad let's go and throw some on this island now i do want to do a little bit we got some scrub brush here see that we're going to go down with that scrub brush and we're going to down here or just kind of kind of go a little nuts going again going back and forth so we kind of have a little bit of a little bit of a savannah there just add a little detail not too much we could actually use these as a swamp and honestly now that i'm looking at it so look at this yeah it's more grassy so let's go ahead and hold down ctrl z and get rid of some of these i think we hit our limit so we're just going to go to the eraser in the cymbals let's trace all this we're going to use those for a swamp and again the eraser brush and the cymbals will erase the symbols if we were like to the land and we hit the eraser brush oh that is not good so make sure you're in symbols ricer brush we're just going to get rid of some of these and we'll get rid of all symbols so just be aware of that all right let's go back to symbols let's go back to trees and we're going to do these for our he's bigger for grasslands we're just going to put them like that there we go a variable of grass and stuff like begin with any map it is a symbol it's it's teaching us kind of what it is now over here let's go ahead and make some swamps okay to do that we're going to go with this guy we're going to kind of make it bigger we're really going to so we got some swamps right here maybe right here by these rivers all right maybe something like that too maybe yeah that in our peninsula there's a little some something there all right let's go back to our land symbols we got some deserts to do so let's go ahead down in the deserts zip this back down to maybe 20 at first oh there we go let's have a look at that see if there's a different desert more of a mountain right there so we're just gonna go deserts some sand dunes and such kind of spacing these out and be very careful where i place these because we don't want too many of these here we go see if we do that it kind of looks and start small that big do what catches your eye trust your eye stuff like this is like you know english or whatever language you speak you know something's wrong when it sounds weird i got some deserts a little more variables on this one let's have a rocky desert so we're going to get some plants some of these little guys actually when i put him down i really don't like him i really don't like that so we're not gonna do this so we got kind of a cool little map let's touch things up really quick what's that yeah and make sure that the force are a little bit denser now the symbolism this uses is a symbolism that was made popular by uh tooking and his son uh token jr when they created the maps for the hobbit and for the lord of the rings um it pretty much set the standard for what a fantasy map should look like this is kind of the same type of symbolism that was used in there because it is that same type i'm kind of keeping things in a roundish cluster that makes any sense we might have some come down here but you get a chance go check that out they're beautiful let me get some trees down here you know there we go again kind of keeping the clumps all right we're doing pretty good there and again quick review we start in photoshop i mean in ms paint with the line tool we separate it depending on how big we want our map let's say we're just doing something like yeah like this the x's only two can touch then everything else has to and then they have to be on the side that case would get kind of a map that looks like this but again it's a great way to create a dynamic map that doesn't new we don't that that you know this is what we got out of it well this is dan with avinovus we're all done with this the landforms of this map uh hope you enjoyed the stream if you have any questions or comments please in the description below i'm very good at getting to your comments as fast as i can i hope you like the stream hope this is going to work for you and thank you so much for tuning in and have a great day we're gonna call it there take care [Music] you

Channel: Avant Novis

Views: 25,667

Keywords: Role-playing Game, Roll20, How to, Tabletop Game, Wonderdraft, RPG, Creative Writing, Cartography, world building, Fantasy Map, drawing maps, drawing a map, fantasy map drawing, fantasy cartography, D&D map, dungeons & dragons, WASD20, wasd20, making a fantasy map, cartography, drawing a fantasy map, how to draw a fantasy map, how to draw a map, fantasy map making, dungeons and dragons, map, Rpg online, playonline, play online, How to Make a map The basic concept behind a map.

Id: zi0LPSELjaU

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021