Wonderdraft - Inkarnate Killer? (map-making app review)

there are several options out there on the market today for game masters world builders and authors who want to make their own beautiful fantasy maps incarnate is one of my favorites in recent years because it makes it really easy to make a very good looking map however it does lack something in the customization options and in truly getting a unique feel for your map enter wonder draft wonder draft is a new player in the game and today we're going to be taking a look and actually building a fantasy map using this application and I'll be discussing whether or not I think it has what it takes to topple the likes of incarnate let's do it hi everybody and welcome my name is Nate and you're watching WASD 20 a channel about tabletop role-playing games and fantasy maps today's video is brought to you through the support of my amazing patrons patrons thank you so much you can learn more at patreon.com slash WASD xx alright everybody so here we are in wonder draft now in just a moment we're gonna get started with from a blank slate and I'll be drawing out a map similar to this probably but before we do that just a little context about my experience with certain programs incarnate I've had a lot of experience with the free version I now own the pro version and I've tinkered with it a little but I haven't messed with it too much camping cartographer is another one that's very popular it's been around for a long time like I don't know a couple decades and it seems really really robust but it's kind of expensive and I've never used it and it just never makes maps that I feel look beautiful they look like something out of a 1999 computer role-playing game to me so anyway that's just my opinion on that but I think it does have a lot of useful things for game masters still my hope is that with this piece of software we'll kind of get something in between those two something that has more options than incarnate in terms of customizing it but it's not quite as crazy as something like campaign cartographer and can still make beautiful maps like the one you see here which I think it looks pretty nice ok we're gonna start from a blank slate alright so when you first open the program you get this screen we're going to go new and there's several different themes here I'll be showing these off at the end and maybe I'll put a timestamp here if you want to see what they look like but I'm gonna go with will go with pastel I think I like the way pastel looks kind of this nice deep blue there's several different options and looks including black and white and they all have variety in the coast line color landmass outline color fresh watercolor all this stuff but we'll just be jumping right in here now one thing I really like about wonder draft is I can use my Cintiq tablet and my stylus here my pen and I can't do that in incarnate very well like I could go like that in incarnate and then do another one but I can't actually make a land shape you know something like this in incarnate with my pen I can use the mouse this piece of software works really well with mouse or with tablet certain things I did find myself using the mouse for because it was just easier but I'm just blob it in a big landmass here this is something like you would probably do an incarnate and you would usually maybe take the eraser tool and let's make it a little smaller and then you'd go in and you know you kind of carve away at what you have there to make it look a little more jagged and realistic and etc etc but here's the really nice thing about wonder draft they have these elevation tools here so you can lower the elevation of your land or raise and in this case you're like raising it up out of the sea and you can kind of set the roughness and brush size over here and that is a nice way to get a pretty natural-looking coastline will even you know draw an island up here and you can see it it's just you know it's giving me kind of a natural looking island or you could subtract and go in and just carve away at what you have here and it'll give it that kind of natural natural look so incarnate takes a long time to make a natural-looking coastline it's a lot of manual labor but this makes it pretty easy and here's an even easier tool with this you can auto generate I usually go with continent but you can mess with some of the other ones and we'll choose the roughness in detail turn the detail down just a just a hair yeah we'll leave it there and generate and there we go I don't like that one let's keep trying okay that one's pretty good we'll go with that I'm gonna add a little bit to it so once you find one you like you can always customize it I should use the raise elevation tool instead I just want to make this little thicker maybe we'll make something going out here another peninsula going out here okay something like that I think looks pretty good let's zoom out a little bit and see how that looks okay that's pretty good now I think actually I need some more land out here so I'm gonna just make the brush size pretty big I just want less water on my map just fill this space a little bit more okay and it's that easy it's it's just super easy and I don't really have to go in and mess with it I think that looks pretty good the way it is whereas if I was using the brush tool here like you're doing incarnate it's yeah not it's gonna take some work to make it look good alright another thing this has an undo button yeah hey I like undo buttons incarnate does not have that so with the sea you can change the water hue water saturation you can change all the water colors you can customize that the land you can do a lot of the same stuff here and you know you can change these colors this this is kind of an interesting option you can really customize the way I like kind of like that it almost looks hexagonal around the edges like yeah but I think we'll stick with what we had here uniform blend to the default on this one paths you can make roads I'm not gonna be doing this in my map but you can just see how that works there yeah you can make a dotted one and you can make it you know curved if you want to just go like that you can just keep kind of clicking and it'll give it a little bit of a natural variation which is nice the next thing I'm going to do is change a bit of the land color you can just stick with one color throughout but I'll change it a bit we're gonna go with a kind of a grassy region here make that greenish really like it looks good we should make like a white northern just the tips will be a little bit white-ish here let's make our brush a lot smaller just a bit of white and of course you can kind of you know go in and pick an in-between color now and blend it a bit if you want to okay so the blending is not really something I've mastered yet but uh anyway we'll keep the video moving here even though it doesn't look great so mountains I'm gonna add those next I like to add those fairly quickly so there are some color options which which can look really nice I'm gonna try actually these black and white ones that really blend well with whatever color you already have down here and actually before I move on I did want to get a desert color too we can try that out a little bit here so let's add a new color in this central region here let's make our brush bigger I'm gonna keep my mountain size pretty small so my world doesn't look too small and I'm gonna put these mountains in right here and I'm just holding the brush down and going nuts put some more mountains over here as well and you can see that the nice thing about these black and white mountains they're just the line art and it'll show up whatever color so if I put some here it's yellow if I put some there it's a green etc alright now we can also do some Hills so I'll do a few of those and we'll zoom in a bit here so you can see this better those hills are a little small but we roll with it lots of different options I don't like those ones these ones are actually kind of nice-looking alright next up I often like to do River so I'm gonna go to land and then down here you've got rivers and we'll make some going out of the mountains to the sea there we go oh and so I can click once and then click again and we can make this kind of curving river here there you go it's like they're a little thicker than I'd like so I'll kick it down to three and we'll make one going out here if you hold the spacebar down you can kind of click and drag and move it around on the map which is nice just like in Photoshop next we're gonna go in for some forests so several different options here and again the black and white ones are just going to blend with whatever background color you have on the land and the other ones will you know be green basically there's also these kind of Tufts of grass here so let's uh let's zoom in a little more and see how that looks so yeah these grass land here more grass land I made everything so small it's a bit hard to see but I like to keep my map feeling very large this world feeling very large alright we'll do some forests make the trees a bit bigger okay we'll do a forest right here for sure and you can place them individually by clicking there or you can just drag it all around and color your trees in I will choose a different style little evergreen trees I'm having trouble really getting uh getting them very thick in here I'm not sure which slider does that but I just it's not letting me put trees in here so I think that's something that could be improved I would like to just you know put a huge cluster of trees in there it doesn't seem to want to let me do that yeah there's a lot of nice options for trees so yeah we could put some in the snowy region up here and they will be nice and white and you go down here and they turn whatever background color you have there so kind of cool it's a nice feature all right other symbols of course we got settlements and you've got all these like monsters and Dragons and stuff you know you can uh yeah all kinds of stuff but uh I'll mess with some of these cliffs actually will put cliff down here this is way too big there we go some kind of like Canyon out here let's do another sort of thing right here let's uh let's put a ship out in the ocean here zoom out a bit so we can see what we're doing there we go and then we've got our settlements that's it that is a big castle so this is probably gonna be like some kind of capital city now they don't have a ton I wish they did have more and I think they are getting more and I think they're also they have the option for people to make their own custom ones and there'll be like a library I think of custom ones that people have made that you can download so I like my cities pretty small especially when they're this style they do have these marker icons just like this which you know then you can make that quite a bit bigger something like that for a settlement which would be fine and they have these more 2d looking ones here and then they've got a lot of the line art only ones here so that you can you know once again it'll blend with whatever colors in the background but for me I will be using these 3d ish ones here so this will be my capital city we want to make it pretty darn small and we'll put the capital city maybe like right here the mouth of the river it's a good place for a a big port city and you've got others I can put this little key or something out here another little keep of some kind up here in the mountains this nice tower here will put you know this is just a huge tower I made that a little too big and that's okay this castle here and some villages and such little tiny villages and you can some maybe you can even kind of cluster these together and you know put this with this make it seem a little bit bigger alright our map is coming along now in terms of the colors I'm not really digging it let's mess with this just a minute here land colors I need my yellow and we're gonna expand this out here a little more that looks better and then for our green we're just gonna make some other greenish colors here okay so the brown isn't working so well I'm not really digging it we'll just leave it the way it is the colors are definitely something that like oh yeah I need to mess with this more in and really master it I feel like incarnate does make it a little bit easier to put these kind of different colors together to make them look good and they have their presets I don't think they let you choose any color you want but they do have a wide variety not quite sure what this overlay feature is but it looks like it actually will let you upload something as an overlay but we're gonna do some labels now just to show you briefly I'm not gonna label everything here but briefly show you how that works so you can have city presets town presets and water water and terrain presets so for terrain for example we could label these mountains let's try it it'll be just super creative here and call it like I don't know the the rough spine there we go yeah I don't know alright so you can rearrange it you can give it a little curve if you want to and voila there we go so yeah I think that does work pretty well let's do a sea water yeah we'll call this one the eastern sea once again extremely creative here my brain is a little fried it's Friday okay so that's just kind of show you see how that works here we could label the land we'll call this we'll call this the land of gold rock sounds like orcish I don't know so we'll change this from water to let make it City and then we'll make it much bigger we don't want this one to curve and we'll make it like a size 80 font here and maybe even 95 there we go and we will put our title for our world way up here and if we zoom out a little bit now let's see a little better how our map is shaping up we get a town name here we'll just call this the keep oh it looks like it changed this one too so shoot so the labels are a little bit confusing for me here I'm not sure you know I kind of messed up on some of my texts and I'm not sure how I can delete it so that is a bit of a problem this looks like it just resets the presets or deletes a preset maybe so I'm not sure what's going on with that alright so the text I'm still messing with it here and I'm starting to get a little better but it's still a little bit of a learning curve on that and I think they could stand to make it more user-friendly alright so the map is really coming along nicely here and I think I've pretty much showed you everything I wanted to but before we sign off I did want to show you some of the other themes as I promised so you can choose what you want to apply this theme to whether you want it to apply to just the water or the ground or whatever but I'm just gonna try the whole thing here so let's move this out of the way so we can see it better see what it does so let's try the black and white filter that's what that looks like it's not totally black and white go to the eastward filter this one's very you know dark and kind of great gritty feeling I like it got the fuel filter definitely got a cool look paper filter very nice kind of tolkien-esque pastel filter that's the one we've been working in and then you've got the worn filter so lots of nice options a good deal of variety and a lot of ways you can tweak and customize using all these sliders and deciding what you want to apply the themes to so a couple other things I just really quickly wanted to mention is there is the option to add these kind of navigation lines here that you can see so you can add as many of those as you want and I also didn't show the compass roses but there's quite a few compass rose type symbols that you can add so yeah lots more symbols that I didn't really use on the map I made but some nice things so the big question I kind of posed at the beginning here is is this application in Incarnate killer I think that it is better than incarnate in a lot of ways but I do not think it is I think that there will still be a valid place for incarnate and I still think there will be people who do prefer incarnate over Wonder draught personally given my situation I think I would rather have wonder draught first off the pricing this is only $19.99 right now it is pretty affordable and you get it for all eternity whereas incarnate does have a free version so that's cool you should definitely go check it out and sign it sign up for that however their paid version is I think five dollars a month or $25 per year it's a subscription and personally I'd rather just own the software that's my preference still what does incarnate have going for it well I think that incarnate does just have way more options for towns and cities and all these stuff in the pro version even in the free version there's quite a bit but in the pro version especially there's just way more options that's something that probably wonder draft will get with time and carnot didn't have all that at the beginning either so I think it'll just take time for wonder graph to build up that library but I also have to say that I think in Carnot's icons and symbols are just prettier they just look nicer there they're better drawn in general they have nice vibrant color and they're very crisp yet they still kind of have this painted feel all of that said I do like that wonder draft is more customizable it's not so easy when you look at a wonder draft map to say oh that was made with wonder draft where as incarnate there's only like one water style there's very little variation in land and the style of settlements and such and it's just really easy to spot oh that's an incarnate map where as wonder draft maps can look very very different depending on all these sliders and themes that you choose so that's a really nice feature in my opinion for getting a map that looks unique another couple of things I already mentioned is that undo button the undo button is huge it's so helpful and incarnate not having it it's just a real pain in the butt and then lastly you have the coastline issue I love how easy it is to get natural nice-looking coastlines with wonder draft it's just such a cinch and that's one of the more aggravating things when I sit down with incarnate is spending you know a good 10 or 15 minutes getting a coastline to look just so and even so maybe still noticing some spots that I'm not happy with I can tell that was a circular brush right there so I'm not here to tell you what's right for you but I really do like wonder draft and I think at this time I'm leaning more in the favor of wonder draft over incarnate but I think there's a valid place for both I'd love to hear what you think if you've tried either of them leave your comments down below or is there another application that you prefer if you enjoyed this video make sure you give it a thumbs up I want to thank you so much for joining me and everybody take care you'll see me again very soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: WASD20

Views: 564,091

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, wonderdraft, fantasy maps, make fantasy maps, draw fantasy maps, megasploot, cartography, d&d map, making a map for tableltop, making an rpg map, rpg world map, fantasy cartography, inkarnate, inkarnate worlds, world map, mapping software, rpg, ttrpg, tabletop, tabletop rpg, game design, role playing, dungeons & dragons, pathfinder rpg, drawing, campaign cartographer, wasd20, wasd, fantasy map maker, fantasy map tool, dungeon master, game master

Id: AHh6ofAMUJk

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Hey that's the review I watched prior to buying WD!

[u/raykay015]

i watched and already liked it