Inkarnate 2.0 Beta First Impressions

greetings Gamers my name is Anto and today we're taking a look at the new incarnate 2.0 beta this video is sponsored by Dill's wondrous Works more on them later so I've been waiting very impatiently for this update to Incarnate ever since they announced it during Gen Con 2022 I've held off making all kinds of content about incarnate because I suspected it would end up being out of date when this update came out and it got so delayed that I started to think it was actually never going to release but it's here and I finally got access to the Incarnate 2.0 beta so today I'm going to be taking a look at it and giving you my initial thoughts on this now the 2.0 beta is a major update to the Incarnate mapmaking system and it's introducing a lot of new tools which have been requested and we've been waiting for for a long time such as path tools the ability to create rooms and a snap to grid option now on the one hand it's amazing to me that it's 2024 and I'm so excited to be getting what seemed like such basic features like Snap to grid but on the other hand the lack of these features has been the biggest thing holding in C back for years those of you who've watched the channel for a long time will know that I've made a lot of videos on different mapping tools particularly wonderdraft and dungeon draft from mechas SP now these were my go-to mapmaking tools for a long time and eventually I moved away from them and started using incarnate and I talked about why in this video but I'm glad to see that incarnate is finally almost at feature parity with them so I don't feel like I'm being left behind in terms of the features available in incarnate and I can enjoy all of those features whilst also enjoying in more high quality assets and a greater kind of update and fix release so what we're going to do for this video is I'm just going to fire up incarnate we're going to load up a map and play around with some of the tools I'm going to give you some of my first impressions so let's dive into it so here we are ready to create a new map in incarnate and there's a couple of big changes that have come with the 2.0 beta or at least this initial release of it so the main two things as far as I'm concerned are we have the Sci-Fi Battle maps version of the tools at the Gen Con announcement in 2022 they did also show off a classic black and white handdrawn old school dungeon style I have no idea what's happening with that I've not seen hide nor hair of it and it doesn't seem to be in this current version of the beta maybe we'll get it before the beta's over I have no idea but we're going to be working with the Sci-Fi battle maps today just to show off some of the new shiny stuff while we explore some of the new tools and the other half of the new stuff that's come to encounter is the room tool can't remember what they've decided to call it I still call it the room tool it is the ability to create predefined rooms with set walls and floor textures that snap to grid and you can conform them to different shapes much like you do in something like dungeon draft this is one of the biggest things that's been missing from incarnate for making Quick Maps previously if you wanted to make this kind of stuff you had to go in and hand Place walls and hand paint in floor textures and that just took so long so we're going to go ahead and we're going to load up a Sci-Fi bottle map we're going to keep it at the default landscape setting but we're going to use the 4K resolution just cuz I like seeing those crispy details and we'll go ahead and create our map now right off the bat my first gripe about sci-fi battle maps is that there are no planets like you give us the the first canvas that we see is this gorgeous Starfield and I get that it's about Battle maps but where are my planets why can't I make a solar system map for my Sci-Fi games using some beautiful planet stamps I'm sure that will come eventually but it's the first thing I tried to do when I saw this planet scape was like oh they probably have planets then I'll go and see if I can create a planet sized map or see if I could create like a solar system map for like a field or worlds without worlds without number stars without number whatever the the Sci-Fi games are but nope they don't have it the Starfield is just there to look pretty behind the spaceship maps that you create which totally fair enough I just wish there was planets so I actually went ahead and changed the map scale here made it so that the the grid is a little bit larger just so we have less to work at to fill in the map just to make this process a little bit easier and quicker on myself but if we go ahead and toggle on the grid you can see I've made it a 20x 15 grid versus the standard 40x 30 just to make it so that I don't have to do as much work filling it in for this video and making them map so the first thing that we want to do is we want to create some ground this is the the first thing you do in most incarnate maps and when we do you can see that we get this nice like metal plate texture that I really like overall I'm really impressed with the textures and Assets in the Sci-Fi style they're all really pretty and really great quality but I want to look at the tools so I want to do here is I want to create a little scene for us to experiment with these tools and I'm thinking just kind of either a corner or an intersection of a road one or two buildings place down some assets see how we get on so for our road we're going to use this nice light ashalt texture from the industrial section of the textures and we're just going to toggle on the grid and find a spot now I can see a kind of L shape here that I think is going to work really well so what I want to do is I want to switch over to the rectangle tool and just drag some of that in and start applying that texture so there's our road texture down and the next thing I want to do is I want to take a look at the New Path tool or the line tool and I want to see about getting some kind of curb in there there see if there's already some existing options for that if not what we can use for it so we're going to go over to the line tool open the catalog here and we're going to start out by searching for curbs we've got a couple of different ones we've got metal curbs gold curbs if we want to be super fancy lit curbs and then a few different industrial ones now I like high visual contrast in my maps I like big Punchy looking Maps so we're going to go with the light curb here and then we're going to toggle on the grid again you can see that this isn't fully aligned to the grid so we're not going to use any snap to grid options which I don't actually see for this tool anyway so it doesn't matter but we do want to use the pen tool ah there we go the pen tool gives us the snaps a great option but we do want to use the pen tool to get nice straight lines and then we want to choose starting point and go in and add our curb now immediately what I'm looking for is I'm looking at Corners because all tools like this that procedurally generate artwork of a repeating pattern along a path struggle with Corners it's something that dungeon draft struggles with it's something that every program I've encountered that does this kind of thing really struggles with so I wasn't expecting incarnate to be any different here and if we take a look you can see see that there is some strange overlapping of the textures they've tried to hide it by offset in the seams which I like and I think when you zoomed out with the way that this light bar curves as well it hides it pretty well I think that's about as good as I would expect that particular texture to appear along a curve really but I did notice that if we go into the settings here we do have options to change our caps and change how things end so we can change from path endings to nodes and nodes doesn't really do anything here it just makes it look worse so we keep it at paths and we can toggle on caps which would be at the end that we're not going to see here if I go ahead and draw another segment so that we can see what this looks like so if we turn off caps that gives us the the seamless texture versus those defined end points that's really useful for a line tool depending on what you want to do with it and then depending on whether we want path endings or node endings it slightly changes the artwork as well again really useful depending on how you're using it and how you want it to interact with other other elements of your map one thing that I used to find myself doing a lot in Dungeon draft is I'd build walls and then I would Place pillars over the corners to hide the crimes of the path tool cuz you that's where I think that you see the sort of stamp-based map maker style of map the most when you look at a map the first thing that screams this was made in something like dungeon draft or now in this case incarnate is those curved path tools that just don't know how to handle Corners so by placing something over them be it a pillar or some other element that breaks up that corner it helps disguise that element of the the shortcomings of the tools and when we're building out the map if as long as we keep that in mind there's a lot of things that we can do now this is a road so presumably we're going to have some car assets or some other things if we just put something that breaks the boundary here and just covers up a little bit of this corner hides the problem now if you don't have the time to make your own Maps today's sponsor deil's wondrous works is the perfect option for you dww makes high quality handdrawn battle maps for your fantasy campaigns and they're the original creators of the phased battle maps which allow your scenes to evolve and change as the battle enfolds I'm a huge fan of phased battle maps because they add that extra level of drama and spice to boss fights especially when you're playing in a VT setting by signing up to Dill's wondrous work patreon link below you'll get access to hundreds of handdrawn Battle maps dozens of animated maps and several years worth of 5 and pf2 compatible encounters ready to be used in your games you can grab a free sample pack of maps to try out which is linked down below and when you're ready to sign up if you use our Link in the description of this video you'll get a 50% lifetime discount for as long as you're a patron using the dww inflation ti so thanks again to Dill's wondrous works for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel so the next thing that I want to do is I want to start working on some buildings now I've done a little bit of testing with this so that we don't have to just watch me do it live in real time on camera and all be bored as I figure out how the hell this works and I've noticed something kind of weird now there may be a way around this and I haven't found it yet cuz I haven't had a enough chance to play but when you're making buildings using the room tool which is what we're going to be covering next when you place down a building that has its own texture baked into that it interacts really weirdly with the levels in the scene so you then can't go in and color on top of that building's floor with a brush tool in a way that intuitively makes sense to me I'll show you what I mean so if we go ahead and change our options for the building and choose a wall and a floor so in terms of wall WS I want something fairly basic so if we go to the Human Alliance we've got nice blue walls and then in the floor so we click on fill and we can either choose a color or a texture we're going to go with a texture and let's figure out human architecture again so if we go ahead and drag in a room you can see it places it as though it's a building places the walls places the floor that's great but if we then go back into the brush tool and use our four ground option and I'll switch over to something nice and bright here just to make it really easy to see what I'm talking about so if we try and draw on this particular room you can see it doesn't work I can still draw behind it because it is a different level and it interacts with the levels differently but it won't draw within that floor if I change my brush layer to be top I can then go in and it will draw on it but it draws on top of absolutely everything and that's not always what you want now you can change what layer this appears in terms of its object positioning which is really nice but I can't immediately see any way to impact it with that brush tool now the only way I found to get around this is if we don't fill in the floor if we just place the walls using the room tool and then we fill in the floor using the brush tool as normal that allow ows you to paint on top of the floor this is only something that's going to affect people who are looking to do more intricate Shadow work who want to get in there and do painterly textures within the basic thing if all you want is to just put down some basic rooms and you don't want to do more of the Advanced Techniques within a program like this just use the room tool as normal but I thought it was really worth mentioning because it will keep you from unlocking kind of the true potential of software like this so if we go ahead and turn off the fill and draw a room we can then go back in choose our Square brush tool open up our flooring option change it to foreground draw in our floor and then by doing that once we switch over to the brush tool you can see that we can then paint it over it so we can paint in those Shadows environmental effects like lighting and things like that we have a lot more control over the textures and the colors of the scene by doing it that way rather than using the room tool as it is at the moment so what we're going to do is we're going to use our room tool we're going to turn the floor off because I want the option to go in and do the fancier things with the lighting and things later on if we want to and we're going to put in in a basic building so we're going to start off by kind of putting it on the corner here extending it off the edge of the map because this this is just going to be a street corner in some sci-fi city so we place our walls here and then the next thing I want to know is how do doors work so in the room placement tool you've got a bunch of different options you can place differently shaped rooms you can brush in rooms which is really nice being able to brush a specific shape for a room really really cool especially when you put the fill on and get in those complex geometries to fill in really nice then we've got an option for editing the nodes of the wall and minutely changing the shape but then we have the portals option now this will allow you to break the wall add doors and windows so this is our next step we want to add a couple different doors and windows into this to start getting the shell of our building so if we hover over the wall you can see it will show where our initial doors are going to be placed if we turn on our grid we can see how it looks in relation to the grid and I'm actually going to turn snap to grid on for this so that all of our doors are in line with the grid just to make play a little bit easier when we're using VTS so I think for this what I want to do is I want maybe three distinct buildings within this corner I want one of them maybe down here I want one of them here and one of them here here and then we'll split them up using interior walls shortly so these have made openings and you can see that they have placed custom end caps on those openings so that they're not just hard lines on the texture of the wall that's something that I really like now I've used a bunch of tools like this and quite often when you split a path or room or something you get these really hard dividing lines and like I said before I end up having go in and put nodes and pillars and columns and things on them to hide that so I really appreciate that you get those by default so if you want to just leave the door open the option is there it looks like it is done with some intention now we want to place our doors I don't see an option to do that here so I imagine that is going to be a stamp based thing which means at least initially this throws into question how much VCT capability this is going to have so one thing that I know that incarnate did mention in the kind of release materials for the 2.0 beta is that you're getting snap to grid and you're also getting kind of dedicated vtt expore in relation to that snap to grid so if we just go and check that out quickly and Export as image we do have the option to export it as a VT grid determine our Grid's pixel size and determine how big of a grid we want our X for but that is where it ends so we will get get Pixel Perfect exports for importing into our vtts but we don't get any baked in compatibility and that's something that dungeon draft for example still has up over incarnate you can make a map in Dungeon draft and Export it as a universal VCT format and then pull that into a lot of your virtual tabletop programs like Foundry Etc and all of the wall lighting door information will be baked in right from the start which can save you a lot of time from having to manually Define boundaries within your VT makes a really big difference and I really really hope it's something that incarnate quite quickly bring in now because more and more people are playing on Virtual tabletops and I think that if you want to stay kind of on top and you want to be a competitive operator in this space you have to give that option but we'll go into the stamp tool and we'll have a look and see what we've got in the way of doors so we start off with let's go to the Human Alliance and click on doors because that's the version of the walls that we're using and we want to go ahead and rotate them and my initial thoughts is that they are enormous and they're also a little bit industrial looking for what I want but that's not a problem so we're currently twice as large as we want to be so we're just reduce the size down to 50 and see how that places so we've got our exterior walls what about interior walls well that's a perfect opportunity for our line tools so we'll go ahead and jump back into that grab the pen stroke and we'll look and find some interior simple blue walls nice and basic we'll go with that now I'm really interested to see how these walls interact with the other walls I want them to appear beneath so let's go ahead and change the layer to be minus one because the others are by default on layer zero so I'm hoping that by changing this to layer minus one they will appear beneath so we're going to stick to snap into grid for this because these are interial walls we want to set the dimensions and let's go ahead and do that so it has appeared underneath let's go ahead and cl click off there put in a new wall and see whether or not we could get that wall to appear above by selecting it as Layer Two For example and it does appear both so that is fairly intuitive for how it interacts with the other walls which I'm grateful for it would have been really annoying if it didn't work that way and changing the layers changes how it interacts with the other walls ideal with with our walls in place we want to start working on flooring so we're going to drop into the brush tool again open up the catalog and look for a couple of different flooring options so we are going to put snap to grid on we're going to have it go in like this we can either we're going to have to have it go to here and then apply to an off snap to grid doesn't align with the grid that is really annoying so this is something that I can manually change fairly easy but in my mind if I choose to have SN to grid enabled and I'm placing down a texture that clearly has a grid in it why is that texture not automatically aligning to either of the axis of the grid that's something that I feel really should just be the default rather than having to go and manually change it and it's a re again it's a really minor nitpick it's something that on a typical quick map you're not going to care about but it's something that if you want to make high quality Maps little things like that are going to slow you down at each stage of the process and it's another reason to use something else you know so in my mind a texture like this that is grided at 100% resolution scale at default level its grid boundaries should align with at least one of the axes I can understand not aligning in every direction so if it's got a number of squares within its own grid texture it might mean that you end up not aligning in everyone but I want it to at least align with some otherwise you get this mess and if you export out with the grid baked in this just looks sloppy if I turn the grid off it looks great with the Grid on which is how people are more likely to be playing in vtt play it looks wrong it looks like someone has done the job wrong so next thing I want to do is I want to place some more paths and textures snaz up the road a little bit get to the point where we're ready to start adding stamps and I'll do all that unless I run into a problem and then come back okay and here we are I've placed some more paths I've done some Road markings some Central row markings these little Crossings and these little curbside markings and then I threw a barrier down just because I was interested to see how the Jersey barriers looked and pretty impressed through some bad wire on there all looking pretty good so I think we're ready to move into stamps and pretty excited about this I really like incarnate for stamps it's one of the main reasons why I switch to it as my primary mapmaking tool over things like Wonder draft and dungeon draft because the stamps are such higher resolution especially when you export at 8K they look really crisp they look really nice so I'm excited to see what the Sci-Fi stamps look like because they are all pretty new to me so there are are actually quite a lot I wasn't expecting such a large amount of stamps right off the bat because it's a brand new style I was expecting a much smaller offering it's very cool that there's terrain City and spaceship options right away and what I want to start with is I want to start looking for cars because I really like adding cars to maps for sci-fi and it seems like we got a pretty decent selection between the the city cars the corporate cars and then some Industrial District options so we've got things like trucks and gas trucks and something that I think is really cool is there two states for each type of car so there's a version where the lights are on and it's supposed to be in motion I guess and there's a version where it's off and I really really like that so we're going to go with a taxi cuz it's nice and vibrant and you know big and yellow and we're going to have a look and see and that sizing is actually pretty pretty good at 53 I might up it a little bit I think 63 might be good no let's up it a little bit more 73 Let's Go 75 and call it there and that gives us our car scale so all of the cars will be at 75 quite narrow streets but I think that works for a cyber Punky disopan City and you know we could fill this road up with cars we could have them you know absolutely everywhere or we could use a car to cover up that corner cap I think just just having a car sort of parked on this corner as if they're going to pick someone up from out here so we zoom in and I want to get them so they're right on the curb there like that and if we turn the grid off so we can get a proper look at this is a nice texture so we get some specular highlights and some Reflections we got a little bit of interior detailing the glass looks really nice overall very impressed with the quality of the car stamps let's go ahead and look and see what other options we've got so we have a bunch of different sections we've got arid worlds City Corporate Human Alliance Human Alliance Fleet industrial district lighting shops and Simeon horrificus weird alien bug planets um we're going to go with shops I think and I'm going to start off by populating one of these stores I think I can see some racks uh some empty weapons cabinets and some filled weapons cabinets so I'm going to go ahead and grab these uh set our sizing back to the default 100 I'm going to make this a little corner gun shop I think that's very dystopian and sci-fi this is cool that's one of the coolest elements of sci-fi map making I think is all of the neon signs that you can get and so we will we will put a weapon shop sign outside this holographic SMG on display I think that's a really neat option and while we're at it we will use this as an opportunity to experiment with some lighting tools so this is a hollow sign that is bouncing some nice blue light around so I want to go into the brush tool I want to open up color option I want to select a nice blue tone something that's going to match relatively well and I want to check against that so I want something that's a little more blue so shift that over towards the blue a little something more like that yeah uh so we're going to drop the opacity way way down and we're just going to start painting in some light and see how that looks that looks pretty good to start let's see how right so we want the softness all the way up we want to increase our brush size I think and increase the opacity a little bit and then just start painting in a little bit of a light and immediately that will those are the kind of little details that elevate your map so placing a stamp down like that is fine placing a stamp down like that and adding just a little bit a little hint of light that's being cast upon the world from that goes a long way and if we wanted to go further we could change this from foreground to top so it paints on top of everything we could drop our brush size way down increase our opacity a little bit and start painting in some Rim highlights on the walls there so it looks like it's also casting that light on the wall and that way you get these elements that look as though they're interacting with their environment really big element of making elevated Maps so I'm going to go ahead and just really quickly finish up this map add some more details and then I'll come back show you how it looks at the end and talk about my closing thoughts for the Incarnate 2.0 beta okay and here's my little sci-fi scene a little corner shop section we have a gun store a little grocery store and a little terrifying Chop Shop doctors with a couple of Android limb containers and just a body on a chair and it's a dystopian nightmare overall I'm pretty impressed with incarnate 2.0 it is definitely a big step in the right direction for what I want from this program but there is still a long way to go there's a lot that they can do to make this more VT friendly I think that they definitely need to add tools to allow you to export the wall and lightting information lightting is probably a thing that they need to add much more VT integration but beyond that I've only got a couple of really minor gripes with the 2.0 beta so far the alignment of the grid to the textures that's pretty frustrating and the way in which the flaw of the room tool interacts with being able to brush on it but other than that I've been really impressed with the 2.0 beta so far it's not nearly as substantial a change as I think I was expecting because we've waited for so long for this because it's getting on for like two years now since it was first announced compared to when people will everyone will finally be able to get access access to this you build up expectation during that time you can't help but build hype and build an expectation over such a long period of time and it's not that this doesn't meet the expectation because I think it is good it's just that it's not as drastic uh step up from the Incarnate that there was before as I was expecting it's kind of bringing the functionality up almost to the other kind of mapm options available out there today but there's still some way to go and I hope that the beta will continue to roll out new features and I'll keep making new videos when they do now that the beta is finally here and hopefully it will continue to grow and continue to be an awesome option for people looking to map make on a budget because there is that free version of Incarnate which is a really attractive option if you don't want to go and spend a bunch of money on making Maps I'd really like to know what you think of the incar so far down in the description below I'd also like to know what kind of videos you'd like to see me make on incarnate down there before and if you haven't already check out this video where I go over my reasons for switching from Wonder draft and dunger draft to Incarnate but until next time happy gaming

Channel: Icarus Games

Views: 2,396

Keywords: rpg, “Icarus Games”, tabletop, dmtips, OneNote DM, DM Bible, onenote dm bible, dungeon master tips, be a better game master, best dnd, how to play dnd, game master tips, dungeon master, DM Tips, DM advice, how to D&D, homebrew dnd, homebrew, #pathfinder, pathfinder 2e, pathfinder2e, pathfinder second edtiion

Id: Fr2WsJnlPCA

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024