Intro to Dungeondraft, Updated Version! [Includes some new version content]

all right so everybody thank you for joining uh this is sort of an intro to dungeon draft my name is jeff todd i operate morevold press kind of as a side gig uh basically making uh maps and like yourselves um i have used other mapping software in the past um i have used wonderdraft which is sort of the sister uh software if you will um made by mega sploot uh two dungeon draft so wonder draft is more for top-down maps whereas dungeon draft is more for building interiors you can still do some you know wilderness and whatnot but i certainly uh probably wouldn't use it to make any kind of large scale world map when i have something like wonderdraft which is you know specific uh specifically created to do that um in the same way that incarnate used to be mostly uh top-down world maps i know they've released their battle maps um stuff uh most more recently and a lot of it looks you know pretty decent i have it but i haven't played around too much in it because i guess to be honest dungeon draft is just too convenient uh for me to feel like switching away um so it sounds like most people who are here have not used it before and have only seen you know maps of it so if that's true i think then just kind of giving you guys a quick tour of the the facilities and how it works um and the workflow of it would be helpful and then certainly if there's any questions feel free to just shout out along the way um you know this is this is time that i want you guys to be able to have to ask your question so don't be shy i think what happens a lot of the time is people try to get started and they just don't understand how to do one thing or another they get hung up on one little tiny piece that frustrates them and then they say well this is junk i'm going to move on to something else or i already know how to use this other software that may maybe isn't as good but does does what i want and i know how to use it so this is what first of all can everyone see the screen okay yeah okay perfect so this is the what dungeon draft looks like when you come into it um most people will start by clicking new new will bring up the new map interface here there are some templates where you can choose if you're making a map for say a 40 inch tv or a3 4 paper a3 paper i think i've only ever used a4 paper then you have a width and a height specification um and these are just grid tiles basically so i i almost always start with the 35 by 24. you can change it once you are inside of the program so don't worry that if you make it too big or too small you won't be able to make changes so i'm just going to click ok and when i do that you'll see that it loads these these some assets i'll talk a little bit about how you can load additional assets um but then we get into an interface like this you probably saw when i loaded in i was kind of zoomed in i'm down here in the lower left hand corner you'll see there's a space or middle button for panning so if i hold down space and i move my cursor back and forth you'll see it pans around the map you also see control plus mouse wheel is zoom so if i hold down control and click mouse wheel i can zoom in and out um those two you know quick shortcut movements are very helpful uh toward doing really close work on your map and then seeing obviously how everything looks when you're up away from it so those are two things to get used to very quickly um i will spend a second just also explaining this down uh the bar down here because some of this will be one one in particular will be very important to you guys and hangs a lot of people up when they first start trying to use dungeon draft and that is uh so you have grid you can turn the grid on and off so whether you want to have the grid or not you don't have any control over how big the grid is so you can't manipulate the grid lines up and down or back and forth so if you're going to want to do that and place your own grid on it you can turn the grid off and export your your final map out of it without the grid on it and then you can overlay a grid on it in photoshop or whatever other software program you would want um or or i often will will release ungridded maps for people in roll20 and i do it for myself and then i'll just import it into roll20 and align the grid to the map in the way that i want to um the other thing that's very important is this this button here called snap um snap when it's on i'll move my cursor and you'll kind of zoom in a little bit so you can see as i move my cursor up and down you'll see that it's basically it snaps from vertex to vertex right it always goes to to a cross section i don't have any ability to come like for if we're in this little box that i'm making i i have no ability with snap on to go to the the center of the box it only get lets me go to the outside that's really handy for when i'm drawing um a box or a circle or something where i want to make sure it's a very specific measurement but i may want to place objects or place walls or have the ability to just freehand whatever i want and that allows you to do that by just unclicking snap so if i select snap it's no longer clicked and now you can see i can put my cursor anywhere on the screen and i'll show some examples of snap on snap off for doing various operations up here on the toolbar menu has many things that most of you are i'm sure familiar with open recent documents save this is where you change the map size so if i click on this i can come here and say oh i i started with 35 by 24 but i actually want to add four more tiles to the width so i'm going to go ahead and add 2 to each side and then click ok and now i've got a 35 by 28 instead of 35 by 24. if i say oh you know what no that's not what i wanted to do i can go back and subtract those away and then we come back to our regular page i didn't know about that feature for months so i'm so glad i found it now the one thing you want to be careful about is and it warns you you cannot undo a map size change so please make a backup before you do it just in case you push in minus instead of plus and you erase half your map um and then there's no way to get it back because there is an undo and redo but unfortunately undo won't work with map saves changes so just a future warning to people uh preferences object tags user folder package custom assets i'm probably not going to go too much into those you can adjust like maximum level of undos have it be automatic backups every so often this was more prevalent or necessary earlier on in the beta of dungeon draft because it did crash quite frequently um now i don't i don't think i've had it crash on me for for probably over a month um and i'm in it every day so i think you you probably have a good amount of wiggle room there you don't have to worry so much about but i wouldn't i i haven't clicked on any of these four things for months so i doubt as new users you will either new is what we push when we start a new map open obviously when we open a new file or a new map we want to look at save self-explanatory i'll talk about export for a moment so export you have three different options you can export as png as jpegs or as universal vtt which is a file type consumable by things like foundry for for online you know virtual tabletop play so you can you can put them on all three um if i'm going to be putting something out for people to use in like roll20 i would say do it in jpeg because the file size is going to be much smaller and roll20 free um you know requires five megabytes or less paid 10 megabytes or less and so you're just gonna get your more bang for your buck in terms of the amount of resolution um and then you can adjust things like brightness focus opacity uh when you export you can also have pre-custom grid sets so if you're doing roll 20 for example it will go automatically the default is 70 pixels now that's pretty low but it maps up to roll 20s natural grid size so when you make a map and you've got hallways and and you've laid it out on a say five by five grid um it will be the five by five in roll 20. now you can customize that in roll 20 so my preference is i put out a map in as high a resolution as possible that will allow it to bring in so that people get the best quality they can but that is that is kind of the basics of that undo and redo i think are probably pretty uh normal for for most programs and you would understand what they do and then assets is dungeon draft comes with a a stock of i think they're up over a thousand stock assets meaning things i can bring in and drag and drop bookcases tables chairs whatever the case may be but there are other packages out there that you can go and get in case you like other art better or you want to just expand on areas that you use these are three that i have just loaded right now and i can show where those are located in the assets when we go through that let's see any question about that top bar before i go into the sidebar and then we start doing some stuff when you were talking about the undo map size is that like you know you make it like you put a put put part of your building on the edge of the map and then you shrink the map down yes so i'll show you a real quick example that makes that disappear yeah so if we do so i'm i won't i won't uh step by step this for you until until later but let's say i put something like this here um yeah if i go to a map and then i say change map size and i i want to add two more because i've put my building too close to the edge so now i want to create more space but i accidentally you know click minus instead of plus and then hit okay it eats up that building and you'll see that undo doesn't highlight meaning it's not an undoable change so now i've just i've lost that i'd have to redo it now in this case i didn't really do much right i only drew a building but imagine you've just worked for an hour populating a map and you just erased you know like four grids of the entire map so that's where you can get into trouble so that's why a you want to be real careful when you're changing map size as well as you can make a backup and that helps too just don't save it right away it's another recommendation um that i would have and it does do automatic updates and saves so i would be just careful about using that that's that's the only thing i would worry but yes that's what happens it eats the map and then you lose it all right so on the side um you have these these various uh buttons i'm gonna go through what they are quickly and then i'm gonna start working through them and showing you how it works so the first is building tool building tool is what you use to put down flooring caves doors walls what's called pattern shape tool and i'll show you what that is rooftops so it's kind of your bread and butter of creating the thing that you're making which is like these objects or these areas it's very quick and easy so i'll show some quick examples so if i want to for example make a building i have all kinds of floor options that i want i can choose wood stone carpet a different kind of stone a cobblestone some some nice tile for like uh marble or tile floors uh some straw damaged wood and then you'll notice that this wasn't inherent to me either apparent i should say is below both the flooring and the walls there's also a little bar and that bar controls the color of the flooring so you can change the flooring too so for example um if i take the default which is kind of like this and i drew a box so you'll notice as i as i'm holding down my left mouse button as i draw this box and you'll see it kind of gives me the grid dimensions of what i'm drawing so i can kind of keep take that into mind if i'm trying to make things specific to a certain size if i let go then it draws it with the wall and the flooring i've chosen so in this case the wall i've chosen is wood the flooring i've chosen is this wood um and if i don't like that the color for example then i can go down and i can change and say no i want really more like of a richer this is like maybe a wealthy house or i just i don't know the type of wood in the area is this so then i can come back and uh and redo that if i try and draw the same box then it just replaces everything um with it obviously i can i can you know add on to this anywhere i want so if i want to expand the the building at all i have to do is just encompass that um you know with my mouse and it will continue to draw that out in this case each of those mouse clicks that i just did is something i can undo so if i click undo once twice three times you can see it slowly moves me back through all of my choices and changes it back you can make you know circular objects you can make a polygon tool to make you know whatever object you're wanting so the flooring is pretty easy to create uh and then you can obviously so if we wanted a stone floor and maybe like a cobblestone um style like a tower or something of that nature that i could choose those and so now you have this stone floor and sort of cobblestoney exterior and then if you want to say add walls to the interior then i would choose the wall tool and then i can say i do i want my walls to be over or under each other i usually do under so that everything i draw will be under whatever i've already drawn and you can choose which wall you want to be on the interior because sometimes you might have a stone exterior but you want a wood wall interior but in this case let's do wood and wood so now you'll notice i've got snap on so it's it's making me go vertex to vertex which is very helpful um when i'm doing something that's you know blockish like this right a rectangle with all right angles and everything if i want to do it that way so then i could draw a wall here and say okay these are going to be like a hallway and this is gonna i'm gonna make some rooms um so i've kind of got a room a room a room a room and a big long hallway um and now i can you know go around now i could come down here and say i want to add some doors and these are all dope portals because these are doors and windows so i can there's a couple things i can do one is anchored means it will be in the wall like it will only put the portal that i've chosen which is this door in a given wall object if i click unanchored it will let me put the door wherever i want and also to rotate it around but in this case i almost always use anchored and then block light we'll see lighting later but black light lets you decide if the if the object should block light or not so if i put a door here in a window next to it but i want the window to allow light in then i'll click allow light for the window and then i can go back and click block light again as i continue and now if i and i'll go over light later but just to show you how it works if i pick lighting and then come here you can see that the lighting will not go through the door but will go through the window cave brush is another popular tool so this is very easy let me get rid of some of this other stuff up here first and um this is very important too uh you can also erase as easy as you can create by simply pressing alt so um let me get rid of everything that i've got here except for the walls obviously that i've made i have to select the walls and actually get them going by hand so i'm just i'm clicking on them and then just hitting um delete and i do that with the select tool and we'll go over that here in just a minute um but let's say i i go back and i want to show you how the uh how getting rid of it works so here i draw a big rectangle let's say oh you know what this is too big or i want there to be kind of a thing coming in here if i just hit alt you'll see my if you look at the cursor the little circle right now it's yellow yellow is create blue is replace or remove so if i have it yellow and i expand it and i draw a box like a five by five box it's only going to create more onto the area that i did not have it in already however if i draw that same 5x5 box while highlighting it by holding alt down um you can see it's blue and when i let go of that i sometimes i have to i let go too early then it will remove it so this is a very easy way for you to shave down the sides of your buildings or for you to add um you know kind of be free with how you're adding stuff to the building and not be you know oh i made a mistake i made this too long rather than go to undo and then redo it um you could just say alt and just take out that piece and that can be very helpful um the other neat thing is you can like if i take circle as a tool um that allows me to make some neat shapes out of my buildings so if i want like a curved entrance or like a garden or i don't know something that's i want to create a look and feel for my building that is more i don't know akin to the architecture i think would exist in this area um it's all very circular then maybe i would pick that or use that um and i can carve that out um and make you know these little alcoves or make these areas um which i find to be very helpful same with the multi-tool if there's a very specific shape that i want to make now this is a part where i would say i want to use snap off instead of snap on so snap on means i can it'll take me vertex to vertex so i could as i draw it only allows me you know to take these big one grid jumps if i want to draw something um and like omit it right so i could hold alt down while i'm making this and then that will take out the piece that i just made however turning snap off will let me kind of move wherever i want so now i could just draw whatever eye shape i want in the middle of this building and it will remove that shape so snap is is very useful to turn on and off for different reasons and i'll continue to highlight what those reasons are but in this case when i'm drawing or omitting or removing pieces of a building then i use snap on or off to make it easier or harder for a lot easier for me i never make it harder for me to make it easier for me to be able to build what i'm looking to build all right so i will get rid of all this i will try there we go um so cave tool uh basically cave tool also has you know basically as you can see i can use my mouse wheel to go up and down or i can select the size that i want to make here and this is a suit you can make you know an interior cave for one of your adventures in in you know 10 seconds right so you basically just hold the mouse button down draw your cave you know draw a tunnel here draw a tunnel here oh i want to link these up um oh it's going to have another tunnel back here and i don't know the boss is going to have uh some big cave back here i want them to fight and he's going to have like a little escape that goes out here or something so you know in in 10 seconds i've made some cave system oh and here and we need an entry uh so maybe this links up and then it goes out here and then this this you know i don't know goes into goes into something actually you know what let's let's not do that let's erase that part uh but this is gonna go out into something so you know here i've drawn this cave tool i can i can adjust i can change the um color so on the color you'll see there's a plus the plus means add another preset so right now it comes with only one preset but let's say i say you know what i'm going to make caves a bunch so i'm going to i really like this color this darker color of floor so i'm going to accept that and now it's going to be there as a preset for me to use anytime i want to same with the wall color i want to have my wall color to be you know a little darker so i'll do that and that's going to be a preset there for me now so now whenever i draw caves if i want to add on to this or make a new room it's all going to be following that same color convention so you'll see here there's dig cave and blast open um blast open is something that i use for a couple of reasons one is let's say that uh out here and i'm coming to this brush later but i'm gonna do it quickly just so that we can highlight the point um so let's say i've got some like th this is you know there's a cliff or there's grass or a forest and that's where people get to this cave um so if i go to my cave tool and i've got some forest that i've made out here some grass that i've made i can hit blast open and i can come and select the area and basically this removes the part of the the cavern including like the walls so it lets me have like more more of a natural opening um so people can just you know players like looking at this can just like walk into the cave rather than being this sort of awkward uh wall that we have to pretend isn't there so i can uh click the blast open in the same way that i can hit alt and and click uh over areas that i've blasted open to close them so that's also possible another reason why you might want to use a blast open is on the interior of your caves so for example i'll show one thing on the next thing down which is the terrain so you've already seen me draw like some grass you have four terrain options in dungeon draft that layer on top of each other so i can have you know some grass over here if i want some different colors of green i could pick like say moss and put some moss on top of the grass to make it just look a little different obviously i'm not being very very careful i could pick some gravel and put some rocks in here so on and so forth now you'll notice that none of these options i'm clicking in the middle of this cavern none of these options work inside the cavern right if i take the grass and i'm holding the mouse button down i literally just draw it up into the cavern you'll notice as i enter the cavern it just sort of disappears and no longer draws so it and and that is because dungeon draft uses a layered system so what i mean by that is if i go to something that uses layers like uh objects so i go to an object tool you'll see here is the list of the layer hierarchy so it starts at terrain and then above terrain is below the ground above below ground as caves then a flooring then below water then water then one through four of layers we'll talk a little bit about why layers are important then portals like doors walls above walls roofs above roofs so um here in this case uh because terrain is below caves it won't show through right caves takes precedence caves will block terrain which is generally what you want because the turn you know the cave is on top of the ground you know you think about if there's snow out there or something and you got a cave well snow isn't in the cave or grass isn't in the cave but sometimes you want to represent um a like i don't know you have like a druid cave or something or you've got a lot of growth happening inside a cave and you have some water for example and you want to represent that blast open in the cave option is one of the ways that you can do that so i can come in here for example and blast open this whole section of inner cave and then that allows me to use the terrain inside the cave so then i can come back with the terrain and maybe maybe i you know don't want maybe maybe i want grass right um i'll get rid of everything first so i'm i'm just using dirt because that was that's the base terrain um so i can just erase that um but inside the cave now then i can say all right well i guess i do want that to be like some grass because i want this to be kind of like a druid cave or something so you'll see there's a nice kind of border if i don't like if i think it goes too far i can go back to my cave brush i can stay on blast open but i can hit the alt button and i can draw back over where i want it to stop right i can erase the blast open that i made so now it's a little bit smaller and in this case uh which is also nice as i can i can go and grab water we'll talk about the water brush here in a second but in this case i'm just going to grab um you know a certain size and i'll drag it around and this will create some water um so now i've got some water inside my cave which you can do you can draw water in cave but you'll notice there's a difference in its appearance because the the cave is beneath the water and one of the reasons why i might want uh the water to be not under cave floor is there are some nice textures and some cool looking things you can accomplish by placing terrain underneath water for example gravel underneath water gives it a very cool ripply effect and makes it look like just natural rocks kind of living underwater so it's very easy to create kind of this neat kind of textured look and if that's too much i can go back and select dirt and then come over here and just kind of click once you know in a handful of places and it will start to kind of clear away the terrain and that's how you kind of layer terrain on top of itself but you can see here where the cave floor still is even though i'm pressing the terrain button of the rocks it's it doesn't complete it so you can see the difference between the water that has terrain under it and the water that doesn't and how you may want to have this effect inside your cave rather than this effect okay so that's that's just a a nuanced thing that and somewhat new that i discovered maybe i don't know three weeks ago um which is which is really helpful if you want to have snow in a cave or you know you want to represent like uh swampish uh or like necrotic or some kind of flavor in a cave outside of the only thing generally you have that you can control which is the color of the k4 any questions on on caves k floor that kind of stuff before i move on to the next thing oh so fascinating perfect so i'll erase this a hitting alt button i'll just i can just um i'll go back off flat i dig cave you have to these are these are separate options so if i hit alt and start erasing it will only erase uh the blast open parts um not the the cave but if i switch to dig cave and hit alt and start erasing it will then erase all the cave stuff that i've made and you'll see as i erase the cave you'll begin to see all of the terrain that i was actually drawing because dungeon draft does it does do it even though your hierarchy is covering it the layers are covering it it still makes it so as you can see so then if i go to terrain and i go back to dirt and i just click and highlight over all this i can erase it you'll see it takes a little while to undo now you have this intensity button over here and if i do that all the way over and i click you'll see it gets rid of it much faster because this is kind of like you're telling dungeon draft i i know what i want to put down i want to pound it put down a bunch of dirt or grass or whatever and i wanted to do it fast right i wanted to not waste time putting my stuff down versus if you if you do less intensity that's how you can do better blending so if i want to put some of this green on top of this this regular grass if i do i'll show you first without it if i do it at high intensity if i start pushing my mouse button you'll see how fast it spreads out it's it's hard for me to get kind of like a creep or a sporadic spread it kind of takes over in these large chunks very quickly but if i undo all that and i use a low intensity then if i start clicking my mouse you'll see it starts coming in much slower and i can kind of control the spread a little bit more so i can make it a little more like i don't know artistic the way i might want it to be if i want the green just to be intermittent throughout all of the terrain i can i can use that intensity to make it easier for me to create the image or the picture or the feel that i'm going for maybe it's hills with with sporadic you know parts of grass cropping up here there maybe the darker green is where i'm going to put trees or the lighter green is where i'm going to put trees or something and that lets me make those kinds of determinations also if i'm making a path i may want to have you know some control over making making rocks in this environment a little slower so it doesn't draw them all thick in because maybe i'm making a forest path that's overgrown and so i don't want it to be super thick and i can always come back in with it and just kind of like go over it with that now i have found if you're blending colors together it starts to get a little hard to see the rocks in the same way or if i have a mono color so if i've got just like moss for example and start putting the rocks over that generally i think there's still a little bit of grass or some other thing that's coming in there maybe it's the intensity yeah okay so the intensity is also um governing to some degree how how thick it's coming in and how you know view visible it is but you'll see as i'm trying to like thin it out when i have the high intensity it takes huge chunks away right away versus if i turn my intensity down and click over it you'll notice it starts taking away a lot easier a smaller section of the stone so this would be ideal for me if i'm trying to like make a a path through the woods and i'm trying to make it look you know overgrown like it's if you can see the rocks but the grass is prevalent and it's it's moving over so this is like a faded path or like a natural trail you know a walked path rather than a paved path versus if i had high intensity and i drug this through then this looks more like a road right something that's that is frequently traveled so on and so forth so let me return all that to what we had before and then for the same uh water um we'll go over water here in a second but i'm going to get rid of the water just by hitting alt um and and erasing it that way i could all if i if i put it back i could also just pick a select tool like the circle and then just circle and make a circle you know a spherical or ovoid a bit of water and i could also use alt and just erase all of it so even if i draw on something kind of crazy like this i don't have to spend my time alt you know erasing all of it i could just take the circle tool and just say whoops uh and just say get rid of all of it water you'll see has two colors the lower color is going to be what color the water appears like first so if i pick this blue color and then draw some that'll be the color that you see the second color is the color that you see on the interior as it deepens to show that this is deep water so for example if i wanted this to be dark right this is the outer water is shallow so it's lighter and then as it gets deeper it gets darker i might pick like that color and so then as i continue to draw then you'll see that at the periphery um it remains that light blue color but then it gets deeper as it gets darker as it goes into it and you can here you can select the blend distance of the water right so if you want the shallower part to be further in and the deeper part to have to be more water for it to be deep then you can just change the blend distance you know to almost nothing and have the deep water start almost immediately so if you're doing like a coastline that that where the the continent tapers off or something of that nature gradually then you might have a higher blend distance so that it looks like you've got a little bit of land before it starts getting deeper so that's just some nuanced stuff about water but water in general is pretty easy you know you just you draw how you want um so you know you can draw you can do your initial drawing however you want it's very free and open and easy to do and then if i want i could later come in and say all right i'm gonna i'm gonna change the shape a little bit i'm gonna kind of carve away some of the exterior um and make it more into what i want maybe i want something like this shape or that's too much like normal so i want to carve out some some little areas or something so it's very easy for you to add subtract make changes do whatever it is you want um and for you if you wanted to build like some land or something i can take away a little area here and now this could be an island and you could go into your terrain brush for example and say i wanna pick um some sand and we're gonna put like sand around the edge of the island or something and we'll put some some greenery in the middle of the island and let it kind of blend out to the sides like that um and maybe touch that up a little bit you know you can see the sand underneath the water um as it spreads out and looks a little bit different and then maybe we put some rocks on top of that on both the water and on the sand and the island right now this is kind of getting crazy uh but again i can zoom in i can narrow my scope down i can start clicking on the sand to kind of break up the rock so that's not like so concentrated in the same way that i could clean up and expand kind of the greenery till i'm happy with how it looks you know and then and then whenever i'm happy and good with how things are uh then then i can just leave it alone or whatever the case may be and i can draw on the rest of the rocks if i want the rocks to to live out here as well and i always like adding some texture because you'll see you get this this inside of dungeon draft you get this real nice like watery ripply effect which is always just very visually pleasing to me um but that's a that's an easy way that you can make like a little island now i'm going to show another thing you can do on this these so cave or um the building tools we kind of went over making flooring and making walls uh we went over making walls interior or just wherever you want i mean i could draw a wall literally just wherever i want right now and it'll draw that for me even though it's nonsensical and i wouldn't do that uh you can put portals wherever you want but if it's anchored it'll go only in walls you've drawn you could make the caves uh pattern shape tool i will probably get into this later but um this lets you make flooring options but in a in a a pla um placeable by you and you can control the layer which is important so on on buildings i can't control the layer because it is a set layer the the building is a is flooring and floor is a specific layer that you cannot manipulate however pattern shape tool gives you a lot of the same flooring options like a hay you know like a ground so if i wanted to make like stables or something i could i could kind of get like a dirtier like a color of that and use the the omni tool and say i want i want there to be you know that flooring over here and so it makes that color i can draw any shape that i want and then i can make this go on top of other objects i can make it go below other objects and that can be helpful to me in a variety of places um but it's good to just know that it's there i did i probably didn't use this tool for months and months when i started i just didn't need it but as i got a little crazier and started to try different things it became a useful tool to me roof or brand new they just got put in um i would say like less than a month ago probably less than three weeks ago and basically you have two options you can do a quick box where you just draw a box or a shape and it will draw roofs which is super handy so for example if i was making like a village or um a system of alleyways or something i could you know say i want this is all going to be like dirt paths and then i'm going to have like some some pathways like you know running through my my buildings and maybe it's next to this lake okay um and then i could you know put some some grass around that so here's my little tiny town next to this lake that has my you know nice greenery around it and i'll just kind of complete some of this actually i'm going to go ahead and put all this in here first just i like to layer as i think it would have originally grown because then i think it's more natural so for example before these houses were here it would have just been grass um probably um so if i were making a map i would probably put down that stuff first um if i'm making something like rooftops and things of that nature if i put down a building i usually do the building first and then i worry about terrain later but then i could come back in here afterwards and then say okay and now i want to designate where where do i think like walking paths are um so maybe this guy's front door is here and it comes out and this guy's front door is here and it comes out and there's uh there's there's a main like road that comes through town and curves around uh and comes this way and then like goes you know on its way out of town now this is a this is since i'm doing a road and i don't want to have to wait for it to this is a thing where i might put use the intensity so i don't have to wait as long holding my mouse cursor down for it to draw that and so then if i go back over it you'll see it kind of draws it in more thickly and maybe i have my ti my road coming out and leaving town here something like that um and then i can turn my intensity back down because maybe now i want to say okay this guy's door is here and this person's door is here and they're gonna have maybe like a path off off to the lake or something and then they'll have another path that cuts in from the road um so there here we have you know some little paths and some little roof tops so this is this is it was very handy from the aspect of i want to make a town scene um but it's not important really what's in the buildings because i don't think the players are going to go in the buildings um i just want to be able to quickly quickly create an alleyway or quickly create a part of a city or a market or whatever that i can have because i it's really ultimately all the action is going to take place outside they're going to be running around through these alleyways and and that's what i want to use um so that's that's the rooftops it's super handy i'm really glad they added it i'm actually this won't really make any sense to you guys now but as you use it it might i also was really happy that they put in roofs because it adds another level that you can you can make objects be roof level or above roof level so it gives you even more layers to work with and i'll kind of talk about layers here pretty shortly to why they're important so that's terrain brush i think you've seen a decent amount to see all the terrains you can highlight the white box a little grid and this will show all the terrains that you have access to so there's cracked earth dirt dry grass grass gravel which is what i use for like roads limestone moss rocky terrain um which is more of a darker stone it's not it's not actually that's not it there we go uh and then sand which we've seen sandstone snow swamp void and then this is actually rocks is from a a group or a asset customized assets it's from one of these caves and spiders or reefs and jaws so it's actually an asset someone else made that you can use inside of dungeon draft water brush i think two probably you've got a pretty good idea of you get the square the round the omni tool and then the different brush shapes to be able to draw your your water i use the omni tool because when you draw the water with the tools i think you'll notice that it kind of makes some sharp cuts that may not be aesthetically what you're looking for so a lot of times i'll use the omni tool after i've drawn my water and then simply go around like the shape i've made with the omni tool maybe just a little bit outside of what i've drawn kind of like this i'll try to go fast it won't be as good as if i took my time but i think you can kind of get an idea obviously if i want a little slower it will be smoother but then then you end up with like a much you know curvier uh lake or river or whatever the case is if that matches with your vision so that's that's a way you can smooth out the edges with the omni tool or if you you know really are like well i don't know for whatever reason i want some river running in between you know this these houses and i just want it to be there i don't know there's some troughs it's magic it's coming out of a storm drain i don't know what you want um but the tool might just be not ideal that you know this that's the smallest you can get and trying to draw it through here can sometimes get annoying because maybe it doesn't draw the way you want so it gives you just some extra some extra capabilities the next brush you have is the materials brush materials brush can be really useful it is controlled by layers so you can move the you can move the materials beneath each other as well as other objects so for example if i picked uh above walls but below rooftops if i chose say this acid and i clicked in the middle of the roof that i've already placed and the ground you'll see that it only shows the acid underneath of the building and then hides the acid because the roof takes priority of due to the hierarchy but if i said no i want my acid to be on the rooftops showing and i re-clicked here you'll see that the material goes now above the roof so you have acid you have like a a kind of a walkway like a street i see a lot of people use i don't but as much but i see a lot of people using this as like a street very easy to just kind of make this i would say in a city right this might be a better choice for making like streets very quickly um there's gold so if you have like i don't know a dragon's horde or something and you want to create a bunch of gold you can do that this all works with the alt as well so i can erase it as quickly as i made it um one small thing that i had to learn when i was trying to erase it and suddenly couldn't i would be doing stuff like this where i put i forgot what level i was on and say i originally had picked level three and made some stone and then uh went back to it like later after i reloaded the map and wanted to erase it and i would do alt and start clicking and i'm clicking right now and nothing's happening and that's because i'm i'm trying to erase layer one stone there is no layer one stone there is only layer three stone so i have to go to layer three and now when i hit click alt and press you can see that it gets rid of the stone uh so that's unfortunately there's nothing i can't click on the stone with my select tool i can't highlight it somehow or have it tell me that it's layer three so unfortunately you just have to kind of be good about remembering um what level it is or you just have to do trial and error until you get what you want there's a couple of different grasses so you can kind of quickly go around say oh i want there to be some grass around this house or maybe around the edge of the edge of the lake i personally don't tend to use a lot of these grass options um just because i'm not it it a lot of people would say dungeon draft has a somewhat of a cartoony feel which i actually enjoy the aesthetic but i do feel there's some assets that reinforce that cartoony feel of it and i feel like these two grasshoppens are one of them so i don't often use the grass options i will instead default to assets of bushes and grass to to accomplish the same thing there is an ice so if we wanted our lake to be iced over i can just add some ice on top of it um and do that there is however no omni tool for uh materials which i don't like because then you sometimes have to either make your lake the size of the ice you tron or you have to just be careful and be okay with there being some overlap or some some ice not drawn exactly perfectly over over the lake you've made then there's obviously what can you have if you have ice you have to have fire and then this one being like a stone tool and the nice thing about the these is for stone for example i can draw all this at layer three if i click on layer four then i can draw some more stone and that will draw it on top of itself so this is kind of a cool way of making a tiered you know rock system or something like that if i wanted to do it that way that's one way that you can make cliffs and make rocks and make obvious elevation changes um there are some inherent uh not flaws but limitations to doing it this way for example i can't layer terrain on top of it now so that limits what so it will only look like the stone and i would have to rely entirely on object placement to make to add greenery and add other things and i'll show uh the other way here in just a moment so we can get rid of all that and obviously i made that one on layer three so i have to go back to layer three to get rid of it and then you'll see i had this one selected so even though i'm going over these areas with alt pressed down it will only get rid of the one that i have selected if i'm going over that and i can zoom out to do this a little faster if you've got the rocky thing that you just made with more layers is there a way to make like a incline to from one level to the next yes yeah so um the way i would do that let me let me actually know what let me just uh i'm gonna start a new map okay so the way that i like to do elevation is there so right below material brush which is conveniently the next thing on this list is path tool path tool lets you draw a variety of cool things like blood trails chains uh cliff face log fences um train tracks for like mining mines or carts ropes shadows which i'll show stairs this is super handy for making like curved stairs now you kind of see how how jerky it is you might say oh man it's so hard to draw a smooth stair that is indicative that you have snap selected so if you unselect snap and now draw then you can see that it should go much smoother for making those those turns you know obviously like crappy looking walkways these are some of the extra assets that i i have that are not part of core dungeon draft so i won't get into those um but let me get rid of these so one that i use a lot is this cliff tool um so under these let me let me quickly go over the interface for tools in general so you have layers again so i can designate layers for my uh layers which are with for my two path tools which is very important and i'll see in a moment um i can choose whether they're over or under each other and so for example if i draw a like cliff edge here if i have over then anything i draw will go over that if i go under then anything i draw will go under anything at that same level and that that's very useful for the hierarchy of these object as you place them down and i'll show you kind of why then there's smoothness there's width um smoothness will will actually i'm not exactly sure i haven't used i think it's maybe more for let's see stuff like the um exactly sure which one the smoothness none of those seems to be too much difference whether it's it's smooth or not so i guess i will almost never mess with smoothness but i do will mess with the the width of it and i'll show you kind of a couple tricks i use for creating kind of forced perspective so if i go back nope i wanted to undo okay so let's go back to um the cliff face so the cliff face depending on which way you drag um this one for example will make this top be like the higher elevation and this bottom be the lower elevation um if you have it like over each other now this is all layer one but if i have it over then i can take another one and put it kind of o for this one which then starts to look a little bit like it's it's on top of each other you can give like a little gap for example and that kind of can start to also give an impression of of height and then you can use the terrain to come in and i don't know we could do sand right then you can kind of fill in some sand maybe it's sandy up here um but down down below it's it's rocky or something right so that's an easy way that you can kind of like show this this this height difference and it's a little hard with the way it's drawn here but let me let me back out a little bit and let's do something slightly different so if i pick for outs we can stay with sand i always use so let's let's put some sand down i just want to make sure we have enough um so then i might go here and take the path tool and then do something like this so now i can kind of make uh say okay i've got this thing um and then when i go back up you gotta go this way um that's still not the right way uh yeah okay so that is how i would do like you know here's a way up onto this thing um you then have a transition in and transition out so a lot of times when i'm drawing these i will draw like basically where i want all of my walls to be first for my my elevation to be and and then end it just a little bit before i would want it to end for sure and then i would decide do i want it to just like sort of disappear where i could say i want it to fade when it starts and fade when it ends and then when i draw more it will kind of like disappear right the more i click and you kind of lose track of where it was here and it kind of like looks like it's just fading into the sand so that's that's one way you want to make sure you're going the same direction of course so it doesn't look weird but that's that's one way you could do it another way you could do it is you could pick fade and um on transitioning in whichever way you're drawing and then shrinking on the way out so if this is the right direction for drawing then you'll see it kind of like looks like it tapers off and i'd want to do it the opposite this way because i have to draw this way so in this case then i want it to actually grow and shrink so they're there then you can have like you know the little on ramp onto your area the nice thing about this is it lets you keep all of the terrain colors and everything on top of it and then i can layer these walls on top of each other so if i choose path tool again and now if i increase this maybe i don't know 15.15 if i take off of and let's see let's take off grow and fade we're just going to like layer it on top i'll worry about blending it later but then if i come on top of this now i can i can keep kind of just along this edge and start drawing multiple layers and go up maybe you know 0.35 or 0.2 um larger each time i kind of go up so the wall becomes like a little bit bigger as it gets closer to the audience which is us so now now it starts to look like you know a raised wall which i think is really cool you can then also have some some cool things this will show another feature of of building tools wall tools you'll notice that there's on some of them there's an edit points this is super helpful um let's i'm going to back up a step uh if you'll forgive me um and go back to building tools so let's let's go back to building you know like a building here um let's say i've got something like this and this isn't exactly what i want i want this corner to actually be out here or here or something of that nature i could redraw it with the tool or i could go to click edit points and then you'll see as i move over the wall you'll see all of the points on the wall and i can click on a given point and then move it and just put it where i want it and then this way i can make all kinds of wonky shapes and i can make a building kind of exactly the way i want it or if i drew it and it's wrong right then i can i can bring it all back in and say oh no i didn't mean to go that far but i don't have to worry about it i can use edit points later and fix it edit points also works with path tools so if i were to go to path tool and edit points um then from here like for example what i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna say you know what i kind of want there to be like a cave here but i've got this i've got this for too forward so i really want to have happen and you can create new points so i can click anywhere on the line and it will create a new point that i can manipulate now i'm on snap so i want to turn that off because i want to do fine tune control right and so now what i want to do is i'm going to move this back i want to move that line back kind of away from the rest so i have kind of like this gap and then i might want to actually okay so that's that one it's a little confusing sometimes to know which which layer you're working on um so now i've got this little this little kind of a circular area which could easily be like a cave facing and so that is when i would then come and use this shade tool the shadow tool i'm going to change this is all layer one right now so to be if i drew if i drew the shade over it it's going to go over everything okay and that's not what i want what i want is to to be underneath all of these and to be underneath it it has to be on a layer beneath layer one because that's what i used to draw it now i have two ways i could change this one is i could just use the select tool go select the the wall and then you'll see one of the variables is the layer so i could say i want it to be layer two oh well doing that because the other walls were all layer one now puts it over those so i have to go and change all of my wall layers but if i don't want to do that then i can go back to my path tool to the shadow and i can say well let's put this below water even though we don't have any water that's okay that just means it will be beneath all of these these rocks okay so i can click like that and put some shadow that might not be quite wide enough so let's widen it up a little bit um and then go back over it again so that looks you know pretty good now i have two options i can i can pinch i want to make this darker which means i basically have to draw some more over it i have two options i can keep trying to draw it by hand but you'll notice that when i drop by hand i have to be careful otherwise if i don't i start getting this weird crossed effect where when it overlaps it gets darker but where i miss it stays lighter and so it's very obvious that i was doing some drawing so one way is to be very careful when you draw another way is to draw your initial line and then once you're done go to the select tool select the line of the shadow you made hit you know control c on windows to copy it paste it and now i can just move oop i didn't want to rotate it now i can just move the whole shadow in line and actually you know and it should be exactly like the one i just drew um so now i can just you know keep pasting it and keep putting it you know over itself i guess i missed one of the areas of where one should be here there we go and now i can keep pasting and keep putting into the new the new area so that it keeps getting dark you know in the appropriate place where it's dark and doesn't you know creating those weird lines um so now i have something like that now i would want to put some terrain underneath it um you know to start giving it that that you know that darker effect or whatnot i probably would make this a little larger if you want you could come through with a path tool um use fade and fade and then you could like draw oops we want to use this we want to make sure it's also on a on a layer above these so over layer one um and then if you wanted to and those we're going to reduce the size just a little bit then you could come through here too and you could like come over you know it to create more of the the look of the cave if you felt like well there's too much shadow showing it doesn't make sense visually you could you could carve out some of that cave or you could leave it the way that you want but that's that's a way that i could put something like that onto the map so that this would lead potentially into another map for example any questions on that on the elevation now i guess uh to answer your question uh before i answer additional questions now i could go to this stone and i could you know then do like something like this and then do something like this and then these are layer one layer two so then if i wanted to i could go to a path tool um have this be layer two and then um i don't know have something you know where where there's some kind of path like up on oops i'd have to draw it backwards here you know up onto this thing but it starts to get a little wonky excuse me with um with the pathing tools and the the material brush in in this case uh this would make me want to use potentially some kind of asset like rubble or something in here to mask the obvious break between the terrain and the raised rock if i wanted this to be considered to be like an even flow and we haven't even really got to objects yet so that's that's something to be aware of but you can do it does that answer the question yeah that should work okay perfect any any other questions about um like path tools uh layering things um using the material brush just generically so there isn't like a uh blast out option for that kind of thing no there's no there's no blast out like where i could uh like let's say i don't want this section to be here anymore because i i now have decided i'm going to put something through here you basically have one option for that uh you can you can do what i did or if if you want to change the um the tool at the the course of it itself like you can move it right you can move it around so that's one way or you could choose an object that would go over it to say indicate that there's a way up and down for example so if i went to an object so some way i might want to do that would be i'll go in here and i'll go and pick like a tree like a big tree or something and so then if i put the if the tree is above the other layers right i could do something like this to indicate that that this that you can get on the tree down here on the forest and then the tree actually goes up the side of the up the side of the wall and now you're you know if you follow this up here you'll get there if i did this then i would also probably want to come down um to the path tool and pick um so this is where layering gets important so these are these are i think layer one i made this tree layer two so it would be over above it that's probably fine but i might wanna make this layer three if i want anything else to go underneath the tree but over the rock like plants or other things or if i want to draw like a shadow um in this case i might want to draw a shadow beneath the tree especially like un when it's above the rock so maybe here it's flush with the rock so there wouldn't be a lot of shadow but like down below or something like you know maybe maybe like down this way i want there to look like there's to indicate some some height i'm doing kind of a poor job of that right now but that's that's something you could do to to give an impression that there's there's distance here um between the the rock and the ground something like that but um yeah there's certain things where it's clue g in the way that you can kind of overcome um certain things like that um but there isn't a blast out option for for cliffs any other questions about uh the pathing tools you can experiment with them um you know i use for example like the grow and and shrink or whatever like for chains so like if i want to show distance right i might want the uh oh we have a chat question maybe yeah this will be this will be recorded um and post at a later date for everybody to go back through uh so i think actually here maybe the smoothness let's just try that whoa we're crazy okay so maybe that's where the smoothness is gonna come in i don't know i can't tell um so i would use like the the for like chains like this would be if i want a drawbridge or something and i want this to like perspective wise this is going to be higher than this this is going to be lower to the ground this will be higher up um i may even like do sections of the chain so i might do like you know change the width so start with a big chain and like you know slowly kind of maybe make something small like that and then like decrease the width a little bit or something and then like link it up and keep it going well i'd have to go the other direction looks like something like you know that um and link those up to to force perspective and say you know this is tall and we're close to it and this is far away and lower to it i did something like that on a castle um map and i can bring one i can bring that up just so you can see what that looks like so this is a finished map that i made of a castle that i based off a real castle called castle harlick in wales and there's a lot going on here um as you can see uh but this is like this is an example where it you know you can't tell as well but the chain tapers off as it reaches this block um and then you know gets a little bigger as it goes up and then like for example i layered multiple assets together to make this look like a a wheel that would turn and collect the chain and then i used grow and shrink on the path tool of the chain to make it look like it's kind of wrapping around the tool so if i were to recreate that effect for example here in this map um first i would pick something to wrap the chain around so let's just pick this rock this log and then if i picked the layer the path tool and the chain i would pick grow and shrink and probably lower the width a little bit and then if we want to show that there's like some chain wrapping around it obviously we also have to be over um and and one one nuanced effect um let me see because i think this is layer two yeah so one thing i don't know why um it's probably for a good reason that i i just i'm not privy to but if the layer the path tools like chains blood trails cliffs even if they're the same layer and even if you say above will not go above an object so a layer 2 chain even if i have layer 2 also but over will not go over a layer 2 object so when you're building and again this might be more complex than you guys need at this point but it's something i have to keep track of when i'm making things is to make make things the proper layer so i won't run into issues later so for example if i thought oh well no problem i'll make the tree layer two and then i'll come in with a layer two chain later to put over it i'll just click over that won't work i'll have to make the tree like layer one if i wanna make the the chain layer two but you have a lot of layers to use so it's fine we'll make it layer three so it'll go over it so now here um i have it on grow and shrink so as i move it across you know now it'll shrink and grow so it kind of makes it look like it's wrapping around the tree and if i wanted to go down a little bit more i think we'd probably get a little bit you know better of a of a visualization of that so you can kind of create those kind of effects by manipulating this grow and shrink um and and layering them on top of objects to create kind of what you want okay so we should probably get into objects so for that let's do a new map and let's make a building real quick just that we can populate so here we have a building uh we'll say this is uh i don't know we'll make it like a tavern okay we'll make some walls so let's say uh this is the common area of the tavern oh i don't want battlements though i want wood uh so let's say this is gonna be a little bit bigger this will be our common area let's say we have a hallway that's gonna go i don't know out here actually let's erase that let's go make a hallway go like this and then like this and like so um and then let's say i'm gonna have this be this will be a kitchen or something some storage this will be maybe just some rooms um these will be this will be like maybe a side meeting room or something that people can have and then let's just say these are all going to be rentable rooms so that's kind of one of my my process when i'm making a building is i draw the outside first and get the shape i want once i have the shape i want then i go to the interior walls and start carving out specific spaces and kind of deciding what all lives here where what it was going to be the flow like for something coming in where's the front entrance where's the back entrance if they have one where are the bathrooms if they have one so we're in a tavern obviously tavern should have bathrooms so let's say we're gonna have a bathroom here so i'll wall that off just to remind myself i wanted to put the bathroom here so then i would come in maybe with the doors and say all right well the front of our tavern should have a big you know double door so i'll put a double door there um that's bothering me because it's not even um so let's redraw that so that's that's better another thing that i like to do and this is this is sort of something people don't realize there's a thing called smartstone if i draw a smartstone in a straight line it makes this really cool like closely coupled brick looking thing that looks like a road or a tight hallway if i draw it two by two then it makes more or less the squares like more like a dungeon tile i like to use the single row smart stone for hallways um just because for a couple reasons one i think it looks really cool two in a building this is more of an aesthetic design choice in a building i find it useful to mix the flooring types even if it wouldn't architecturally make sense uh we're not most of us are not architects that are playing d d we we but our eyes are and our eyes want to see want to break things up and are much quicker to understand something if it's like color-coded we can understand at least that this this room has a different job or this room has a different feel to it so if i can give the hallway a different feel than the main rooms i can instantly tell what's hallway in this building and what's not like in a half a second by just looking at it and i find that to be really useful i'll show you the you know i'll go back to the straight wood so if you just looked at this you know from even from a distance if you looked at this right away it might not be apparent where the hallways are right away especially if there were multiple hallways and this wasn't so clear-cut but if you'll see if i make that change again it's immediately apparent where my hallway is and i prefer that um to as like a dm or even a player it helps me understand it's more aesthetically pleasing to me and then another thing is i might change say i might change this to stone for like the kitchen and i might change this is called sewer tile but i just like that it's different i might change that to be say the um the store room for for additional goods from the kitchen okay and then i might put on some doors so interior doors you know don't need to be as fancy so i'll have a door to the hallway i'll have a door to say in the kitchen maybe it's like a little double door i'll put it on the side um they've got a door going into the store room i'll put that here um off the hallway we've got maybe a room here this room can be accessed here and then we've got some ways into our various rooms there maybe for the bathroom it'll just be a plain like wooden door not one of these regular fancy doors and then this one i think we said was going to be a fancy kind of like meeting room off the side so then i put in my doors they're all blocking light now i switch that off and maybe go to windows i have a whole bunch of windows options i have shutters closed open screens they just added all of these which is really cool but you could just choose the super generic window and then just add some windows onto your building which you'll see in just a little bit why that's really nice and important to have those on there um and let's see we don't need one in our store room but definitely we do in the kitchen because that generates a lot of heat and then we'll put a door let's say going outside so we got a door leading out of the out of the tavern in the back um so now we've got our you know we have our building we have our hallways we have our rooms kind of uh set for what they're going to be um we've got all our portals ready um and now we want to put down some assets so we move to this button which is the uh objects tab and we have two options here the object tool the scatter tool i almost never use the scatter tool but i'll show you what it does so if i click on the scatter tool and i click on books i have options of scale rotation and spread basically what this lets me do is if i'm putting down like bushes or something where there's going to be a lot of them and i just kind of want them to randomly be put around then i i click my mount my left mouse button down and i just start moving my mouse around and it starts dropping off the object in in a scatter you know pattern if i increase the spread you'll see or increase the spread value it increases the amount of distance i have to travel before it puts down another object of that same type oh actually i'm sorry no it doesn't it increases uh the distance between each object so i'm holding down my mouse button but because i think i'm too close to a given object it will only drop stuff when it's a certain length away the um if i then uh decrease that to hardly anything then it will just let me put down all kinds of stuff which can be useful for grass or other objects of that nature okay so but we don't want to do that we're just going to put down objects so i click on object tool and i get out this custom this this interface i have again i can choose the layer of the object and that will be very important i can choose over and under which is awesome because that gives me effectively two options on every layer so i have a huge amount of variability i can rotate the objects uh this way so let's say let's pick this map um so i can use my mouse button which is what i use to rotate stuff but i could also rotate it here if i want to i just like i can i can kind of see what it's doing here when i rotate it um scale right you can move it up and down you can also i think use alt up and down yep alt up and down will also adjust the scale but i'm so used to just using it over here you'll see me do that there's shadow shadow will put a shadow beneath the object so i use shadow for big objects that would potentially cast one right so like a desk or a table actually most furniture in general will have a shadow so like if i have a bed i will put a shadow on the bed which is nice because i don't know it adds a little bit of something to that texturally but if i put a carpet down underneath the bed so i'll go to a carpet and then obviously i'm on layer one it's on over so if i wanted to put it on the same layer but be under i'd have to choose under and then you'll see that the carpet will go underneath the bed so that's how you kind of layer objects so if i did layer two no matter even if i was still on under it's going to be over any object one layer item that's out here the reason that gets important and i'll pause for a moment just to explain that is um it's easy to kind of get in trouble when you don't build um when you add things you didn't think you were going to add in the first place so for example let's say i put down like a table so i put down my table and then i want to put down some chairs around the table so i put in i in this case it's working for like if i don't if i forget to put it on under so here i'm like oh that doesn't look good right i want the chairs to look like they're pushed in underneath the table so i click under same layer this is a layer two table layer two chair um but now i can kind of like place the chairs around the table and make it look like they're all pushed in um so that looks real nice um and then uh maybe i want to also put some carpet underneath here so i'll again choose under but it's layer two i'll choose under and then i also wanna put um i'll put over still layer two because i wanna put you know a tablecloth on here i'll make it a different color put tablecloth on the table all right so that works and that's cool and now i'm gonna choose um some plates to put onto the table again still layer two we'll just put that and i'll turn shadow off because they probably don't leave you know big shadows so we'll turn the scale down i'll put it over layer two so it's over that so great all right bang bang bang looking good this is all great okay so i got plates they're on a table cloth they're on my table which are on the chairs which are on the big carpet that's all awesome now if i decide you know what i really want a carpet on top of that carpet to kind of look give me a different look or feel um so if i go and pick the carpet again and now so i want this i want this color carpet to basically be on top in between the carpet on the bottom and the stairs well okay that's over so that must be a problem so i'll just click under oh that's under everything right i've used two as the layer for every object in this whole thing now because i built it incrementally and had an idea of how i wanted to build it and i can also just just move these if i select the select tool and you can just click an object and move it if you don't like where it's at so that's another thing if you notice that it's being weird like i can't get it where i want it chances are you have snap selected so just unselect snap and you can move it where you want all right back to the actual problem so i've made everything in the layer two so that's that's a problem i have a couple options one i can start over i don't want to do that two i can come here and select this and say all right i'm in trouble all this is layer two this is layer two i really need this to be layer one all right i kicked the carpet down a layer and now when i choose this i also make this layer one and now i say i want that to be over anything else that's layer one but it will be under anything that's layer two and now will let me put the carpet in between my other assets that are layer two and layer one now this is a lot of talk about layers um why is that important well how often am i really gonna use layers well depending on how complex you get and how how nuanced you wanna be with the asset placement a lot i use it all the time to create new objects so i'm going to show an example of that because this also comes up a lot which is um dungeon draft doesn't have a well well it has wells now but let me show you the well that it has and and and this was a newer ad so it didn't it didn't have a well for a while and i actually have to search for it because i don't actually use so i can search you can also there's a box under here i can type in well okay so here's the two wells it gives me a closed well and an open well and those are my two options okay that's fine um that doesn't look too bad but maybe i want it to look nicer right there i want there to be you know there should be the the posts and the the wooden you know rod going across it in a a rope and a bucket and a handle like there's there's things that go along with that that i want to you know put in there so how do i do that so what i would do right is i go find you know some base that i want to use and i commonly use the stone circular uh base this thing this guy so i'll go and grab that and i'll pick him it layer one for now so i'll put him on there then i'll go back and find the actual well and since that worked well i'll choose that i'll size this down because i want this to live like inside i want to kind of look like that's the bottom of the well and then there's like some i don't know area in the middle and this is the top of the well i don't know i feel like i like the look of that better now i'm going to get a little fancy here so i'm actually going to change this layer to so what i'm doing is even though i put layer one layer one um all that's important is that these are in order now it doesn't it doesn't remember that this was layer one on top and layer one on bottom it just means that this is this object is on top of this object i can select all of those objects and i can now change the layer of all of those objects and say i want all of that to be below water and i'm doing that because i want to put some water on top of where this water is to have that neat water effect so i'm not going to draw it in that color i'm going to make a circle um you get to an edge of a circle of where you want and basically draw to the other edge and that's where you'd start your circle and then just draw that over so now i have water overnight that and then one thing that you can kind of do which i found is kind of neat i'll search for my wells again i'll get this guy i'll make him also below water but above so it's going to be over my other two things that i've made that are below water and then i'll put that there and then that you know starts to kind of look like the bottom of the well right so i've finished that now i've got the base i've got the the base of my well the top of my well i've got kind of like the in the well now i want to make the other stuff so to make the other stuff i'll switch up a layer you know maybe layer one layer two so now i'll go and find some things to make my posts i frequently use these guys i'm just going to grab a check chat real quick no problem thanks for coming okay so i will then grab this and i'll put those on like either side uh i will go and find the post you know some kind of i got like kind of a long rod here i'll i'll make that bigger and that's a little thick for my my tastes so i'm going to change square uh paste that down just a bit um so i'll put that down just a little bit more all right that's fine so then we'll put something like this um and then maybe you know just to represent the crank it's gonna be fast um i will i will put something on here like uh let's let's make it something like this and then like that something like this and then uh i will grab another little asset here something like that and this will kind of look like the rope tied around it a little bigger okay and then we just kind of like drag a few of these and then i will go and find see do i have a bucket i think yeah so we got a bucket um that's a big bucket we'll size that down all right so that's a that's a little small bucket there we go and then i and that's layer two now i may wanna say you know what i'm gonna put a path tool on this so i might want to make that layer three in fact let's maybe make that layer four and this will show you the importance of the layers so now because i want this rope to be over almost everything except for the bucket or except for um yeah the bucket so then i can choose layer three choose rope increase the width a little bit that looks like a little bit too big so it'll go down a little bit um and now i can kind of go from the bucket you know out now i'll coil a little bit maybe to make it look like it's limp you know up to that and then bring that up to and stop just before it so it looks like it's kind of directly connected um so now i have a little crank on the on the rod and i have you know the rope going to the bucket so now i feel like this well um looks better than just the standard well i get out in dungeon draft and that is that is how i create a bunch of the sort of customized assets that i use when i make the maps because i just think about what do i need how what pieces do i need to make the thing that i'm making and that that's very helpful to me to have that ability to layer the objects on top of each other i'll show another example now i'll show one more thing i hit the select tool i can highlight everything i just made now the only thing that won't work with this is the water but that's fine because you can redraw the water it will remember all of its layering levels so i can move this i can size this down because if i made it and it's too big right or maybe i needed to make it so it was big because i had some fine-tuned work to do but it's really going to be more like the size when it's done so now i've got that i'd have to redraw my water around it but i've got it i can rotate it i can you know make it big i can copy it i can paste it right so one thing i do a lot of is i might keep these objects in a separate dungeon draft file just the objects and then go and open up that if i need them and go and grab like a well i've done before copy that paste that into my new map and just put that somewhere there's another way you can do that so if i highlight this and i hit uh control copy then i go and go to something like uh word so let me open up a new document here if i paste that you'll notice that it pastes all this code okay if i highlight all this code and i copy that then go to back to dungeon draft and i let's let's open a new let me launch dungeon draft again so i'm opening up a new dungeon draft hitting a new map and now if i go to the select tool and hit control v paste it will paste that asset just from that code so if i want to i can copy out once i've made like my own asset i can copy that paste that into any word you know processing program um delineate it somehow right label it so i know what it is and then i can copy and paste that anytime i want to and bring that into a new map so that can be a way that i can create my own asset pool of stuff that i've made so i don't have to recreate the well every time i want to make a well the way i like to make them does that process make sense to everybody any questions about that sorry yeah i was just going to say the um you had mentioned custom assets before and how you got them from other places is something that is different and you would save your custom assets differently yes so um if you're gonna get a if you're gonna get custom assets the way that i do it is you have a assets button up here at the top you click on that this would originally look like blank you would have a browse button to select your assets folder so if you don't have one you'd click that that would take you to basically go find a place to have your custom assets basically just telling dungeon draft where should i look for your custom at your custom assets that you have so then in this case um mine are in documents and dungeon drafts so if i go to documents and then go to dungeon draft custom assets um that's where it would be it's asking me select what folder i would select that folder then if we go to um let's see caves and spiders oops that's what i wanted to go to so if i go to that that pack so we have you know documents dungeon draft custom assets this is where so i like when i got that list from this guy i went and bought this package from this person's website it came as this caves and spiders dot dungeon draft underscore pac file which you'll see as a type is a dungeon draft pack file then i put that file into the folder that i have designated as where dungeon draft should look for custom assets um once i put those in there and reload um dungeon draft then they will show up they will be unchecked but then you check them and you'll hit accept and it will say this it will say you modified the selection of custom packs for this map please save and then reopen it for it to know what they all are and then when you go to your your assets it will put them last so even though alphabetically some of those assets will be called things that are before assets that come in default dungeon draft default dungeon draft all their assets will come first and the last uh dungeon draft asset is like a bunch of boats so we'll scroll down until we see the bunch of boats so here's the bunch of boats and then this is where the beginning of the first asset pack i have which is caves and spiders will start so it's got like these bats and little spiders and eggs and crystals and other things like that and then there's another package that has like some colorable objects of regular dungeon draft including trees which is hugely useful because default dungeon draft only comes with green trees um but some of the anything that is colored well they changed it so unfortunately now you just have to look and see what color you have highlighted but anything that's anything that has that color you can change the color of the asset so in this case i've got the tree so i can make if i want to make like a fall you know smattering of trees i can go and grab you know something like that and i can start adding the color to the trees whereas in default dungeon draft um all the trees are the same color green um which which is hard to have any kind of like variety i guess that's not true you have pink trees and orange trees but those are your three color options versus the asset pack that has a colorable object the as you can see if i change it to like a bright yellow you'll start to see over here um several of the assets that i can control the color of some are unfortunately because of the yellow i've chosen a little uh misleading like i can't change the color of a of a candelabra or a candle but i can change the color of like this cloth and so if i put that down i can i can click on the cloth i can open the color i can say i want that to be blue or i can click on it i can say i want to choose a color and it gives me this big color spectrum wheel or color spectrum and i can say i want to be red and i want to be dark red and then any object i place i can click on it you'll see this bounding box create i can shrink you know enlarge or shrink it i can move my cursor outside of the blue box and you'll see the little hand for a moment and if you click while the hand is on i can rotate it and i can also just grab it and move it and obviously it will maintain its hierarchy so i put this down as above layer one above and so it will be above any other layer one thing that i make does that help with the asset that process yeah definitely and the the pathway assets are the extra assets are kind of the same deal yeah yeah so i have some extra pathways so for example uh with the sharks and reefs or whatever like this is one i think this is actually webbing but i found that uh like underwater uh this looks a lot like reefs um actually i'd have to select this change it to underwater and then use the water brush and just cover it up so one thing i always recommend to people who are using the software is just because something is called something doesn't mean it has to be that you can use it for whatever you want so don't be afraid to just go go find an asset that looks like what you need and then just use it and then just don't be afraid to mix assets to make what you want so for example you know i had like this letter you know and i said oh i want this to be like an official looking document so i went and got this guy this guy's called a bottle but i don't care it looks like what i want i wanted like a stamp so i size it what i want i take off the shadow i change it to like i don't know red for like you know wax or something like that and then i put it in the bottom right and now i've got i don't know a stamped letter right so i don't really care what things are called i just want i just look at the shapes look at whether they're colorable or not or whatever and then just kind of stack them in a way that makes makes the thing that i want if that makes sense um so let's see so um you can you can select a bunch of assets all together like such and move this around or rotate that you know so once you've kind of made them if you're like oh i want this over here instead because that makes more sense because the kitchen's over here or something of that nature then you can do that i think you know it's getting to be a little bit late i want to show one more thing for sure and i'm happy to stick around and answer questions and that's lighting so lighting is this this little three four little star uh icon um you have two options environment and light tool uh environment will let you uh affect the ambient light of the map mostly people i think will use this for like day night so you can change the rgb until you know you have like a lighter and darker version you can also add like colors so like if i don't know if it's like a a forest or something and you want to add a slight green tint to everything you can do that as well i don't mess around with that as much so that's one aspect and i i use this as a check after i've placed my lights to make sure i've got coverage everywhere i want it excuse me so then the light tool is what you would put um on your light sources for example let's let's put a let's put a candelabra you know a candle holder just here on the table maybe two of them we'll put two of them okay and then let's also put um let's go down here and let's put a lantern let's put some torches uh we'll make them a little bit bigger that's a really big let's bring a little smaller uh we'll put some torches on either side of this wall and then either side of this wall okay now uh under lights under the light tool you have three options you have this uh fragments light i don't ever use this i'm not really sure when i would i have um point lights which i use all the time and i use soft light which i use all the time point light and you have color choices so you can color the lights any way you want um so point light i found really useful for two things one if i want to highlight a source of light like a like this is the thing that's lit um it will put a bigger focus on the actual flame point for example so if i'm lighting this i could just take this soft light expand like i can control the range i can control the intensity so i can make it very faint i can make it extremely bright um but i might want to just a balance there so i could just take this and say all right it's it's on the torch and i'll put a couple of objects here if i go to my select tool it'll actually show you everywhere that you've put your light light light is an actual object so we'll undo that quickly here but if i go back right i i can put a light here put a light here and put a light here and that looks that looks fine but what i like is having a little bit brighter and then having the small i i reduce the range to nothing and then i come to the light source itself and click on those and i feel like that ends up giving the light source you know much more a better definition like that's what's lit um and then i have some light that's a lower um intensity that's like around it being cast by it and so you can see kind of here if we if we add some you know heavy range of light um you can see that that it goes through any of the open portals automatically which is really nice and then when we've placed our light then we can go to the environment and we can turn down the darkness right or turn down the light so we can kind of see this is so this is how people might do like night version maps it's very easy to go from light to dark and then this will also show you all your coverage and all your lights and that you know gives you an idea did i light my my rooms and i light my map correctly does it look right does it feel right do the hallways look lit are rooms that aren't lit you know illuminated at all like they shouldn't be right it helps answer questions for you just as a check even if you have no intention of doing a night map i find it's an easy way to like check your work and make sure that you're doing it the right way that's light sources um and how they how they work it's pretty straightforward i also use light point light a lot to make effects for things so for example um i might be making like uh let's say i i i'm making a blacksmith or an armorer or something and and i've got a table for him right i've got this table and on his table he's got um some sword he's working on so we'll shrink that down and put that on top okay and maybe i want to implicate that that this is this is like a magic sword that he's working on so i may you know change the range to not you know 0.5 the lowest intensity not not very high because i'm going to put a bunch and then i'm even though i even though i'm not designating it's not meaningless to be a a source of light even though it would be potentially but i then i put a bunch of these little light objects along the blade so i'm clicking my i'm clicking my button a bunch of times if you hit select tool you'll see i put down one two three four five so you know eight little lights on the sword but at the end of the day then we get like the sword that looks like it's glowing and glowing blue i can make it whatever color i want um and then also when we change the environment we'll see that it has like a slight blue glow to it which you can do to any object to give it whatever feel you want and which is incidentally how i accomplish effects like um in this mind flayer map that i made where it's very dark and it has a lot of of glowiness to it um so lighting was a huge factor um and so i used a lot of light on objects to get the effects that i wanted right so i had like this path tool um but i had you know i have a whole bunch of lights going along it to illuminate it but then in certain places you'll see there's like a con a heavy focus of light and i did that in this case to implicate like this was a like a fiber going along the exterior of their layer that i thought you know any any mind flare could like reach out to and touch and it would it would communicate back to the elder brain or something like that and so these are like you know thought signals that are moving through this fiber so it's lit a little bit along the whole periphery but then there's like these little pulses like these are thoughts running through the area so that's that's a way that you can use light to do a bunch of different things and create effects like magic portals or glowing water or glowing mushrooms or things of that nature where it's not so literal like this is a torch and this is a lantern but this is a thing that either is emanating light and i want to represent that or i want to use the lighting as like a paint brush and make it you know achieve an effect that creates a mood or informs the the viewer of something in that way so uh i know we're you know an hour and uh 40 minutes in so i want to make sure um you know we cover kind of everything people are wanting to see is there anything i have not covered that you get hung up on or have questions about or want to know how to do because it's relevant to your work i was going back to the like when you made that well and you made it three two or three different layers yeah have you ever found and i don't know if you can can you change all of that then to just move that all just to one layer yes so i'll show you okay go ahead pretty sure and then that helps with stacking later in case you know like i said you're you're only i suppose not limited but you know if you need to put that above or below something else but you've already used layers one through four to build it then you're kind of stuck with oh then the path gets stuck under it in the middle of it yeah so let's see um i got rid of the the one so let's let's rebuild that one really quickly of like the table um i i don't think that that works as well with objects so let's try it real quick so let's do like layer two let's make it let's like a few different layers so let's grab i guess it really doesn't matter what we have on here but let's put let's do layer three is the tablecloth um we'll do go up to the top layer four is the candle and uh we'll do maybe layer one just to have that um will be some chairs all right so you know here we have this you know swiftly weirdly dimensioned table with a gigantic candelabra and a tiny little tablecloth but if we if we highlight all this mice i suspect if i change this to level one uh i don't think yeah it's going to condense everything down and maybe because i placed the chairs as over in layer 1 it remembered that and did that but i think i think it's not going to work in the same way that it will in other in other tools so in objects i don't think it's going to work that way with objects i think you're going to need to be a little more purposeful in your original placement of things and and make sure you're leaving layers for yourself as a general rule to help myself i generally say if it's laying on the ground i should make it layer one but if it's underneath something like if i can't easily or wouldn't readily pick it up so things like carpets right should probably be layer one because they're gonna be under things um all furniture if it's furniture like a piece of furniture that i would pick up and move a bed an end table a desk a chest something like that um a barrel a crate i will make almost all of those layer two just off the bat even if there's nothing else in the room yet no carpets or anything i will make those layer too if it lives on something it's papers it's a tablecloth it's the candelabra it's something then i might make those layer three now you know i do a lot of it so i might if i know what i'm making um and i only need to make it once then i'd be comfortable making everything in one layer and just doing it incrementally the right way but to solve yourself save yourself some heartache that i had to go through a couple of times to teach myself not to do it that way i would learn to utilize the layers in a more intelligent way out of the gate now the thing you're describing does work with pathing tools so one thing that i have done in the past is uh so let's say we got layer one we got a pathing tool we're making cliffs uh so i draw some cliff and then i scale it up i do layer two and i draw some more really big cliff that was too big uh okay that's gonna bother me all right so slightly bigger okay that looks nicer okay so we got layer two then i make layer three and i draw some more cliffs and it's looking good and then i do layer four and i draw some more cliffs all right perfect perfect okay and now i want there to be a waterfall and i want the water to cascade over the cliffs down into this pool that's at the bottom but crap water is water layer all the cliffs are various layers so i could select all my cliffs and then i should be able to change those all to below water and now my water will come over and then i can go and pick like some of these uh rippling objects and what like something like this change the color to like a white um put this say on the bottom here and then make a you know get something like this and then kind of like put a few of these like up here something like that and then maybe put some more water on top maybe like a river or something like that feeds into this so in that way with these with these cliffs or whatnot that technique works where i can layer them multiple layers as i'm stacking them and putting them together um and then once i have them all there then i can change and flatten them all back down to a new layer and and in this case like underwater so that i can have like a waterfall going down under it but for regular objects that will not be a tried and true thing that you can just depend on plan ahead a little bit yeah yeah it helps i mean you'll you'll learn that's how i had to learn just trial and error uh you know you spend a long time making some really intricate thing only to find out that you layered yourself into a corner so to speak and now have to like redo the whole thing um and then now you have to spend another like 10 minutes doing something you don't want to have to do that any other questions so all the assets come in these asset packs right uh all so like every asset you see here on the right hand side like as i'm scrolling i'm scrolling i'm scrolling i'm scrolling still scrolling everything that you've been seeing still scrolling still scrolling still scrolling uh everything up to here everything that you just saw uh it all comes just default in the dungeon draft program you don't have to go out and get any extra assets i don't know i get it but like extra assets uh are all in packs like i can't import oh yeah stuff like that yeah well the the only way you'd be able to do it would be like what i showed you earlier where i i like have an asset that's recorded in this way this copy and paste uh code and then i just you know copy the code and then just paste it back into my into my dungeon draft session okay like that would work um i don't know of other ways like if i have i don't know some collection of pngs can i can i import just a random png as an asset i don't think so i think they have to be in those those packages but that starts to bleed over into a whole area of of the program and making the packs and converting things that i just don't have any expertise in yeah i know sure yes i've never made them so it's been described to me that you can if i if i wanted to take this what i guess the process that i understand you would do is you would put them in a in a you know a window well actually probably um let's see you'd probably make it like i don't know smaller i don't even know i don't know how to spell tiles if that's you if you have to do that anyway um i would put it you'd put it in here you'd go and change the terrain to you'd click off and you turn grid off and then you would say you would export this as a png um and then i and i guess adjust whatever whatever level you would want for the pixels and then you export that and you'd save that as you know well well object or something um and then i think from there you can do you can take that png and then wrap that up in a zipped file and i think you just rename that zip file like pac file or some something yeah i'm sure you can like uh google it there yeah yeah it's donation on reddit whatever some some helpful person i'm sure has has created a youtube video for to do exactly that yeah i'm sure i'm not the first person who had like a png and was like well if only i could put this in yes yeah i'm sure that's the case anything else that people want to know about getting started or workflows or that kind of stuff when you save the maps you i saw that you have like the export as the three different options but when you save it to later be reopened in dungeon draft is that a different thing entirely yes so those are those are these like dungeon draft files okay yep and they're very small so yeah when you when you just click the save button um so if i went to i don't know this guy and just click save um it will take you out to wherever and you will it'll be a map dungeon draft underscore map file and you'll just give it a name and that's what you'll be loading and unloading and that will be you know the source file so if you gave that file to someone else with dungeon draft they can go in and they can make all the changes they want and they can you know have it they would have it just like i have it here however you know any any saved version you make on a png or a jpeg or whatever you know obviously they can't make any changes it's just a static static image okay well it sounds like i mean if there's more questions please feel free to ask um if not if you do not have dungeon draft and would like it um just because i love it i think it's a great program i know sometimes people i see them post you know like i would love to use dungeon draft but i'm looking for free software or something i'm actually giving away five copies um just the kindness of my heart to people who want to begin using it because i think it's a great program so if you don't have dungeon draft right now and would like it um feel free to put your just say i don't have dungeon draft in the chat and i will enter you into that uh drawing and uh if you win then i will maybe put your email address then i can send an email to you and get you set up and i'll gift you one otherwise i thank everybody for coming i appreciate your time it's a you know good amount of time hopefully you learned something about it and feel better about the environment and whether it'll be for what you want and if it would achieve the maps that you would want i have really enjoyed dungeon draft from the aspect of it being a very flexible free kind of open environment it lets me work the way i think and it also removes a lot of the frustrations that i have in other softwares i feel other software is difficult for it makes me place like a bunch of wall objects or it makes me do certain minutia that i just it would drive me crazy and would stunt my creative process uh dungeon draft certainly has isn't perfect um but i feel like from a creation aspect um the coloring the flooring the walls the flow of everything the ease of creating caves or buildings or what terrain really lets me make whatever i want and there's there's a lot of variants there could be more in the terrains but it's a really great program it's gotten very stable they develop very frequently in in releasing new packages with more assets or more features um so i've been very pleased with it i also have absolutely no connection with dungeon draft or megasploot or that business i'm just a happy user and uh it's done well for me and just want to kind of share the share the goodness on with other people thank you a ton for for doing this this has been really cool to learn a lot thank you yeah absolutely i appreciate all your guys's time and i hope that uh a that you get it and b that uh you're able to it's able to help you uh because you can make some really awesome maps very quickly it'll cut down on prep a ton of time and it's a great program so again i appreciate everybody's time if you have questions in the future uh feel free to just you know send them along i'm happy to answer questions or help where i can otherwise i guess i'll just see out there in the the d and d role playing tabletop making world thank you you bet have a great night everybody thank you thank you

Channel: Morvold Press

Views: 51,765

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Id: TyUmQMSVSL8

Length: 107min 48sec (6468 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020