First Steps in Mapmaking?

Hi, I'm pretty new to Roll20 (I've played one module as a player) and decided if I want to get into a game I'm going to have to DM it. I bought a PDF of The Dragon's Demand (Pathfinder) but all of the pdf maps are too small to simply paste onto the Roll20 grid. Since I'm going to have to recreate the dungeon maps myself, can anyone recommend an approach that's slightly more pretty than just using the freehand and polygon tools and drawing each line myself? I'm willing to spend a bit of money if there's a good and fairly user-friendly program that you'd recommend. Thanks!

GIMP, <a href="http://www.textures.com" rel="nofollow">www.textures.com</a>, and stuff like Torstan's 6x6 tiles and ProBono's Tiles (go looking in the Cartographer's Guild Forums off Roll20 for those, they come with a free for home use license IIRC)

If you go the GIMP route,&nbsp; this page on the wiki may prove useful...

Don't use roll20 for mapmaking... except for on the fly dungeon tiles or something. It doesn't handle lots and lots and lots of images all at once. Better to make your map using maptool, gimp, or something else and export your map as a single image which greatly improves roll20's performance. You can still add detail to maps in roll20, but you're not going to lag out people that have weaker computers.

Copy/Paste the pdf maps into something like Paint or other image altering program. &nbsp;Simply resize the image (to some factor of 70 pix) and re-save it as a png. &nbsp;It should import fine unless they're less than 70 pix. &nbsp;If the distortion becomes too much try splitting the original image to smaller parts and use paint to increase the size etc. This works for me, but then I'm using larger maps (from various 1E and 2E sources.) Good luck with getting it all worked out.

If it's for a background map, I would highly suggest saving as jpg over png. You can get the file size much smaller depending on how much quality you are willing to sacrifice. Even a little goes a long way. PNG is best for images that need transparency, like tokens, or bits of furniture that need to be able to be moved.

Thanks Feadel, I think I understand what you're saying but the maps are so small that by the time I enlarge them enough that the squares on the original are as big as the squares on the Roll20 grid, the map is so fuzzy as to be basically useless.

Check out Dungeonographer at Dungeonographer.com. The learning curve is quite low, and it has a good amount of power. Caveat: I work for the creator company, Inkwell Ideas. :)