Wonderdraft Academy - From world to detailed map and from detailed to large

hello my name is Edwin I'm a fantasy map maker and today's video is about going from a large overview map to a smaller more zoomed in detail map and I will also show it the other way around to go from a detail map to a larger map this all is done in Wonder draft and I know there are ways to do the same thing outside of onedrap with Photoshop or whichever program but we are going to stay inside one draft and do it with the tools we have here so first we're going from large to small the part of the reason for that is that I believe it's the better way to do mapping of your world if you do World building or just the mapping um I prefer to go from the large scale to the small scale to the details um if you do the other way around if you started the details and come up with a lot of stories and cool small things and you want to get them together in a world map then you run the risk that is starting to look like a patchwork like a collection of just uh single things without the consistency to make it a whole so I prefer to go first with a large overview map and then zoom into certain points and get to the details and stories so this is my own map for the tales of arsenia which is my own yeah World setting I'm not actively using it for anything at the moment but I plan to do a lot of course I plan always a lot but um yeah maybe it will be a game maybe I will write stories for it or whatever but at least I use it to experiment with my map making um as you can see there are not that many details on it there are not even any trees there are no roads no borders uh and only very few cities and other things I personally like it that way because then you are not stuck to anything if you put all the details already on a world map and you go zoom in then you kind of restrict yourself to the details you already put on that world map I prefer it to not restrict it and keep it as open as possible and only have the general layout of things uh from this world map I will as an example go and make a detailed map of this island Tallinn and the Tallinn Empire it's just I can't even call it a continent it's more like a big island uh and uh then you can at least see the bigger differences if I would just take uh kovang as an example than the detail level there's still a detail level difference but it might be less visible so we're going for this one so to make a detailed map in Wonder draft you go to menu create detail map and then you can select here a zoom level which means that it up skills your result so if you take if you put it at one it will just take the pixels that it has here if you put it bigger it will become a larger canvas since it's a small island I will need at least before time zoom there is a risk with the zoom level which I will show later um if you would you take a very big part of your map you don't need to zoom as much and then like two will be sufficient but for now I do 4 select an area I'll just make sure that no island is within the frame and then create and then it makes a separate OneDrive file so whatever you're going to save in this new file is not saved on the world map is to completely separate things so keep that in mind that you can't move it back or copy paste anything back into your original map it's completely different file so now we have this and you can see the resolution is smaller than what I had with the other one it because it's such a small island and I prefer to make my maps a little bit on a bigger Converse so that you can also print them and have them still in decent quality so I go to a little bit I'm afraid then you can also see better what the issue is with this create detail map because details that you didn't have on your world knife also don't go on your detail map which you can best see with the coastline which gets very straight lines because it's stretched it up stretches out all the pixels and for my liking the coastline is a bit too smooth I prefer it to be a bit rather like now there are no details like just around island with nothing extraordinary or anything so it depends a bit on how much time you have in your hands and how much time you want to spend on your Maps but for this one I would roughen up the coastline and that is quite the time consuming thing um so it really depends on if it's worth to you like if you would rather because then it means that you go like all around the island to do things that can be anything can make it with the lower end the race land mass tool can do it anyway so you can do some hooks or whatever you like if you would do the brush size 2 big then I have a bit of the risk that you get this like I I would say it's a typical one the draft Coastline that when you see your map sometimes you can instantly see like Ah that's made in Wonder draft because of this hokey coastline so I prefer it to go a little bit smaller the roof is also not too big if you do the roughness too big then it also gets this typical Wonder draft I feel and avoid that keep them both relatively small and you can like make sometimes add a bit of line you can eat like a pointy thing or small Islands whatever you would like and then go all around the island I'm not gonna do this that in this video because that would be a bit too much time so I prepared that already and I'm gonna just open the file in which I did the whole Coastline and I don't have to save this one so everything is the same except for the coastline is a bit as you can see I added some small Islands which didn't make it to the world map but it doesn't mean that there are no small Islands because it's the details zoomed in map after all so you can see that the whole Coastline got a bit more but there's more to do when you want to make a decent map out of this like the Assets in this case the mountains they became way too big for my taste as well because if you would make a map like this and then start adding trees then you would do very big trees and then it's still it doesn't feel big and epic or anything it just feels like a really tiny island with a very few things on it and one important thing about scale is that the behavior your assets the smaller your island or continent will look like so if you decrease uh will select only mountains if you decrease your mountains in size and you just add a lot of them I'm just gonna quickly this is not like anything uh um here and these are the bigger ones than here some smaller ones and then you can also say like okay there are even some real small ranges here some hills over here on this island we get several even here this one wait it's not only the big mountains but we also have smaller ones and of course we can have some Rolling Hills I'm gonna have to zoom in a bit otherwise you won't even see them so if you work with the smaller assets everything in your world or your content or your Island will feel bigger in scale because scale is always a relative thing you can't make a bigger canvas and expect it to be automatically a bigger world and unfortunately a lot of fantasy maps that you see when people say like I made a map of a continent and then you look at it and you think like looks more like an island to me and you can avoid that by making yes it's smaller and it can be also much smaller than this still I'm not saying that this is the smallest you can go so now we did some more to the mountains so we add a little bit of the hills some these islands and over here because the more small pockets of hills and mountains you've had that will also make it all feel bigger because you create different regions within a region it's not just what it was just an island with two sets of mountains one in another one in the South and now we create some variations to it every reading will get its own identity and and this has a bit of two green color for my liking so I'm gonna change these mountains into something a bit more brownish make them stand out a little bit better gray or whatever color is available and it's for the mountain part but this for us although it is a huge City icon which we can't have this big because then the city is almost the size of an entire quarter of the continent so for now let's assume we do it like this and the front of the name yes you for as well even the bigger I would say black let's make a black so this already looks a lot better as well I think and then there's of course the rivers which are now huge and these are the only rivers that made it to the world map so they are supposed to be huge but in the detail map we'll have also a lot of smaller Rivers so the way I usually do this is I take the width that I want which let's say we do five which makes it like that then I erase the current river that is here and then I place the new one and while I click it I do Ctrl Z to get the old River back so that I know that I'm placing it in the correct spot and before the double click to finish the river I will Ctrl y so it disappears again and that way you know for sure that your river is in the correct spot and then the ones that didn't make it on the world map we can have some previous feeding it and capital lenzara is a bit here where the rivers come together another one over here and then we get this kind of a river system but a lot better already or at least a very different in either the same here wait click for the river you'll revert back and don't forget to make it disappear before you do it and that's there smaller rivets for this one as well and then we have this on the lake is a little bit more difficult in Wonderland there's this Lake brush which you can use but I'm not a big fan of it because it doesn't really give a consistent Coastline effect like you can see the difference with that like at this size I prefer the one on the right with The Sharper Edge and when it's bigger you won't get it it's sharp it's still better than when you would use brush usually I'm not that picky about the exact shape of a leg so I'm just placing the new legs and together they will form somewhat of the same shape but let's start again with the river here so we're gonna erase what we have as well we're gonna start the river and get the open back and it can go through the lake because you won't see it in the lake anyway and then it goes here to the ocean and now that I did what I just warned you about I double clicked without disappearing first oh I can now of course say that I did it to show you what happens when you make that mistake but then I would be lying I just and not gonna be very careful not to double click because find some legs you can always go back to see how your playground but you cannot do that forever so you have to kind of remember how it looked like with a little bit of a hook on the left and a bit of a thinner part on the right make it yeah that doesn't help me a lot here this I will consider than the thinner part and I need a bit of a hook on the left well it's definitely not the same as what I had let's see considered good enough for now and then here we will also add some extra rivers to fit the lake or the existing River and there's one thing which you can do if you prefer and that's to get rid of all the colors now you're working on the colors that you had on your world map so you can kind of see where you had the green bars and the Not So green Parts but you can also just have that world map as an image and every now and then go back to your original image to see it and to color it all again I sometimes preview it with color sometimes with dark colored doesn't really matter but I think for now it's nicer to look at map with some colors on it so I'll keep them and um more reviews because we are in a detailed map and a diesel map has a lot of more details such as small rivers but this is not a map I'm actually gonna keep and use so I also don't want to spend too much time of the video just clicking on reverse so I think I can consider this is done near at this point you can start adding new things this is like the mountain range that we had this is the mountain range that we had the capital city that we had the lake and some of the main rivers and from here it's gonna be the new things the extra things I'll light them up a bit more because they were a bit hard to see so you can start adding your forests mostly on the green part of course in a skill which yeah you can do it very small at the smallest I have it at 10 right now um maybe one bigger would be also fine in this case I think and it oh no it's still small if you've had your Forest I'm not gonna do them all you can use the brush even to get some faster results and of course over here so in Zara we have a forest and a little bit in between along the lake because trees and fresh water are always a good combination here on the island and along the mountain inside oh great places for trees and again I want to finish it to do the whole map because there would be too much time for the video but you get the idea let me add a little bit of details everywhere you can add more pounds I put it down it's the same smaller symbols makes for bigger skill so if we have linza here as the capital that we can have Villages all over the place and move a smaller font like I would say Maybe 24. and a variety of things um and you can fill your island or continent or whatever it is Maybe and that way you get a more detailed map um and you've successfully gone from a large overview map from your world map to this detail map and then I will only quickly go on about how to go from a data map to a larger map which is a bit of the trickier thing because you can't you can copy paste alignment but you can't copy paste the assets on it if you would just do this and copy it then all you have is the landmark and not the assets on it so that's not gonna work so the way I would recommend if you have a detailed map as a zoomed in map of something and you want to make a world map is to make your map a bit smaller like let's say that we have it skill on so that for the assets also go smaller so it doesn't really look any different and then if this part is Island would for example be in the bottom right corner of your world then you turn off the scaling you lock the right and the bottom and you make your map bigger again that way you add to your combat and you have a lot of space to make new contents which is of course not this one but as an example you can fill your world with new things um if you have multiple contents already worked out then I'm afraid that one will drop won't be able to help you since you can't copy landmasses including their assets to a new map so it works if you have only one workout content and want to add the rest but not if you want to stitch together a lot of detailed maps then you really would have to use Photoshop or or any other program like that I hope it explain it a bit in another video I will go a little bit more in to the scaling of maps and the perspective and how you can make your Maps look more epic and big um but that would be a bit too much for this video so this was a more the technical part on how to do it in one draft and the next video will then be about scaling in General on maps thank you for watching and see you another time

Channel: Wonderdraft Academy

Views: 7,734

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Id: CfMWh3jd46g

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023