How to draw realistic maps with Wonderdraft - The Lakelands

hello everybody and welcome back to the wooden otter today uh we're gonna jump right back into another wonder draft map except this time i'm going back to my old trusty website floodmap.net and we're going to work with an existing land mass and make another map based off of an actual geological location on earth and just fantasy it up a bit so here we are today in flood map.net and i'm going to be focusing on alaska specifically i'm going to be focusing on this uh southwestern-ish portion of alaska this area with the blue dots is apparently this low-lying area portion of alaska and if you change the elevation and height water level whatever you want to call it of this map by even just a few meters this area of alaska changes dramatically so for example i'll i'll raise the water level 10 meters and watch what happens to this map a lot of it goes away and this is rather nice actually because it gives us a bit of variety in terms of where we want to look at this coastline and take to our fantasy map so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you how easy it is to get rid of this stuff that's in the middle of my map so because i have developers tools installed in chrome now i can manipulate this map a little bit in order to get rid of some of these overlays so that when i do bring the map into wonder draft it's not quite so messy like we don't have this bar over part of our water body so what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click on one of these overlays i'm going to hit inspect this opens up the developers tools and if you simply right click on the highlighted section which corresponds to the highlighted element down here in this little preview of the website you can click delete element and just like that it's gone off the map so i believe if i scroll down i can right click on this one and hit inspect and right click delete element and it's gone and then i'm going to use the capture tool just to grab the map area that i'm looking for so here we are in wonder draft and unfortunately the computer does not allow you to record things when you're working in paint 3d for some reason like windows just doesn't like that so i'm going to be importing a photo that i just made which is a composite of the two black and white captures that you saw earlier well hopefully if you're using wonder draft you can kind of figure out what i was going for and i named it alaska because that's what it is and just like that bing bang boom we have a large lake uh pictured in our wonder draft application it might be a little distorted but frankly i don't think that actually matters because this is still a fantasy map and now we have a very interesting natural landform lake area that we can fuss around with and now i need to clean up some of these things so we're going to paint some landmass and just get rid of these dots which i don't even know what those are anymore and we're going to get rid of our activate windows thing and we're going to keep these for now because i might change these into river symbols let's see we got paths and symbols and regions labels and stuff so let's start with some symbols i like the way my water looks and my land looks so let's put up some symbols lake areas tend to be fairly mountainous which is what we're going to get into right now we're going to add some mountains so i don't want to really like crowd my whole map with a bunch of tree symbols i've done that before and it kind of takes away from the what does it do it like changes the aesthetic of the map if you just have like let's just say you picked pines and you were like pines everywhere this is my forest pines uh it changes the aesthetic versus finding a symbol for tree blocks which is a thing you can download and install into wonder draft and it's basically a series of symbols that interlock and they make forest blocks in the same style that you used to find in paper maps for like the forgotten realms and things like that i'll just show you what i mean that's a good amount of forest a lot of forest one might say and i feel like this is an ancient place right like there's just lots of ruins all over the place here so i'm gonna put a ruined tower on this island so now we want to start labeling things so i'm thinking of a name for this lake and i think i might want to just keep it real simple i have it on water here we're just gonna start something we're gonna say the lakelands so i kind of like the idea of a pretty sparse labeling convention on my maps i kind of like the idea that this is a wild area and i don't want to i don't want everything to be explored i don't want everything you know to be named and cataloged and everything so let's get into painting a little bit there we go that's a good looking map if i do say so myself i'd use this as a setting for a story or something the lakelands all based off of a real land mass in alaska based around the yukon river with a higher water level all right guys well i think that'll have to be it for the lakelands map i really enjoy making this type of map where we base our fantasy map on a real world location i think that flood map.net although a somewhat flawed website is still a really useful tool for creating realistic land masses that i think the human eye can kind of pick up on whether or not a map is purely fantasy based pulled out of thin air or based off of a real world location there's something about a real world location that the human eye knows that it wasn't just fabricated i've said it before on this channel that some fantasy maps do bother me because they just don't seem to make sense geologically speaking mountains don't make sense seas don't make sense land mass shapes don't make sense but when you build a map off of a real world location and you just tweak it a little bit so that it has that fantasy edge so it's not easily discernible as a real world location you can do great things and create really wonderful fantasy maps while maintaining that realistic edge i hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did give it a like and hopefully if you really enjoyed it you subscribe to the channel i will catch you guys next time here on the wooden otter peace you

Channel: The Wooden Otter

Views: 8,242

Keywords: wonderdraft, dwarven, elvish, elfish, dwarfish, dwarvish, mapmaking, topography, cartography, 5e

Id: 8Q8-IghY4oc

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021