What programs do you use to make textures/objects/maps for Roll20 games?

I'm running a Mage: the Awakening game, but I'm having a hard time finding textures and objects that fit the modern setting through the Roll20 image search. I'd like to compensate by creating my own objects/textures/maps, but I'm not sure which program to use. A friend suggested Photoshop -- is this a good option, or are there other programs specifically designed for GM use?

Photoshop / GIMP definitely work, especially for textures and objects. You could check out sites like Cartographer's Guild for some map tutorials. You may also want to check out software like Campaign Cartographer and Dundjinni, if you want software tailored more towards RPG map making.

GIMP for maps and objects, if I can't find them at RPGMapShare or other locations. TokenTool (from rptools.net) for tokens - I just drag images from the web into it for token creation purposes. There are not many resources out there for modern objects, backgrounds, and so forth - the balance tilts heavily toward fantasy themed stuff. I believe a lot of people who make tokens and other things use 3D modeling software for their top-down stuff, but that seems excessive to me if you just need to add a few things.

Grab, Instapaint, and GraphicConverter.

I use Photoshop Elements and TokenTool for the most part, but if you're looking to do it on a Ramen budget, check out Sumo Paint -> <a href="http://www.sumo.fm/#create" rel="nofollow">http://www.sumo.fm/#create</a> It's free, and entirely web based, but has a surprisingly large feature set. +1 for Cartographer's Guild as well. There's some great stuff over there!

Imagination.

Dundjinni for maps and TokenTool for characters.

I like to do the mechanical design thing and DoGA CGA L3 is dirt simple program for creating tanks, planes, mecha, space ships, and the like. Think of it as a virtual Technic's kit.

pyromancers.com

I draw on paper but then I work on Photoshop. Vehicles are made using Sketchup I explained how to turn a Sketchup vehicle into an object here: <a href="http://toybox-sw.blogspot.be/2012/04/making-maptool-vehicles-from-sketchup.html" rel="nofollow">http://toybox-sw.blogspot.be/2012/04/making-maptool-vehicles-from-sketchup.html</a>

I don't use textures, rather I sprite the whole map together. I use MS Paint for this, because I find programs like photoshop tend to blur my edits, and doing them in the roll20 engine just isn't suitable at all, really.

Sorry if it is a stupid question, but what is "spriting" a map? Does it mean arranging pre-defined squares? Or filling a zone with a repeating square (but then, it would be texturing)? Just curious...

90% Gimp. ImageMagick for quick conversions and Inkscape for vector graphics. For my group that sometimes plays in person, if I want to use a figurine image, I take digital photo with solid fabric background, easily select the bg color and crop with Gimp, and resize as necessary.

@ Patrick do you use the pro or free version?

Sorry if it is a stupid question, but what is "spriting" a map? Does it mean arranging pre-defined squares? Or filling a zone with a repeating square (but then, it would be texturing)? Just curious... Yes, when I refer to spriting as a map, it's arranging pre-defined squares and objects. In my case, I've got a sheet of the different squares used in the Pokemon games, and I'm re-arranging them to make the maps.

Has DunDjinni actually been updated since 2008?

Has DunDjinni actually been updated since 2008? Hah. I think Dundjinni can create some quality maps, but I've never been able to get it to work properly on Windows 7. There's all sorts of work-arounds (install this, then reboot, then install this, REBOOT!!!, then install this...), but I'd like it to just *work*. I'm content to let others do the heavy lifting. I recently built a map in Roll20 using a generic background texture and PNG objects all grabbed from RPGMapShare.

@ Patrick do you use the pro or free version? I use the free version of Sketchup. There is not much differences between the two versions anyway (mostly exporting formats which have no importance for what I do).

Yes, when I refer to spriting as a map, it's arranging pre-defined squares and objects. I do this as well. I used a tile texture for "ground", and then grabbed various transparent PNGs from RPGMapShare and dropped them into the map layer, making sure that they were all sent to "front", so they appear on top of the "ground" layer. So, instead of having one static background image for a map, I end up with a series of PNGs that I can move, delete, rotate, etc… This isn't ideal for all situations, but it worked for me at the time.

Paper, pencil, scanner and Photoshop here.

For modern genres, ink can work better than just pencil, making stark contrasts if you aren't going to use color gradients. BTW, speaking of Mage the Ascension, I remember that Dan Smith illustrated the GURPS version with his characteristic inking/black & white art.

I cant seem to figure out how to make the background transparent with Sketchup.

I'm not sure if Sketchup can export as a PNG with the option for a transparent background, but check to see if it can. Just checked - it can. You select Export, then choose Portable Network Graphics for the format. In the Options, check Anti-alias to give yourself some softer edges, and then check Transparent Background. That should do the trick. Make sure you choose a style that does not render a sky or ground colour – it needs to be white, from what I can tell. Here's a test I did with a Panzer;

I currently use Paint.NET which doesn't have all the features Photoshop might have but it's free and easy to use. Robert: Nice tank - reminds me of the ones in Savage Worlds figure flats. Is the turret a separate picture so you can rotate it on the battlemap?

Not in this test, but if you make them using Sketchup, there is no problem making a separate turret (see link above). The exemple on my blog has a separate turret. The problem in Roll20 is that you can't fix yourself the point of rotation. The system was made for Maptool where you can decide the pivot point of any element. That would be a good idea for Roll20, after all the center of a token is not always the center of the body....

Like one person said above Dundjinni all the way. For the price you get an awesome easy to use program that I've been able to use to easily make all my maps that I'd ever need for my virtual tabletop games. Most really good maps I see were made using Dundjinni+photoshop for touch up.

If you have Photoshop, I am not sure you still need Dundjinni.

Yeah, with Photoshop or GIMP, Dundjinni gets put in the corner pretty fast. It's not a terrible program, although the interface is too imprecise for me.

So I've been grabbing maps out of PDFs and wanted to share a my little tool kit on OSX. Setup: Install <a href="http://www.macports.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macports.org/</a> and then in your terminal run "sudo port install ImageMagick poppler" I then created this little shell script (grab the stuff between the lines) ----- #!/bin/bash set -e if [ $# -eq 3 ]; then FILE=$1 START=$2 END=$3 echo "Extracting pages $START to $END from $FILE" elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then FILE=$1 START=$2 END=$2 echo "Extracting page $START from $FILE" fi pdfimages -j -p -f $START -l $END "$FILE" pdfimg mogrify -format png *.ppm rm *.ppm ---- Then to grab a map I find the page number from the PDF and do: "export.sh MyModule.pdf 45" That dumps all the images from that page of the PDF and converts any PPM formatted images into PNGs.

If you're looking for nice textures specifically, <a href="http://www.cgtextures.com" rel="nofollow">www.cgtextures.com</a> will usually have everything you need. Excellent resource.

matt pierce, That seems like a very useful website! I wonder if you already posted it in the "Game Resources" thread (<a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/290/game-resources#Item_32" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/290/game-resources#Item_32</a>)

Here's my current method for creating maps: 1. Find an actual map/photograph that's close enough to what you want 2. Pull it into Inkscape, and trace over it with any changes. Add basic terrain features, anything that doesn't require too much detail. 3. Pull that into GIMP or Photoshop and pretty it up. This isn't strictly necessary, but it's a nice touch. The benefit of using a program like Inkscape is that you can scale, scale, scale. You could make a single huge map, adding smaller details and cropping sections of it to make area maps as you go. You can also drop in (with or without tracing over) outside art assets - I recommend the maps in the old D&D 3.5 archive online, regardless of what system you run.

I have found recently a program that slices any image (for exemple an existing map) into tiles of any size (for exemple 70 pixels); that you can use in the program to make a map. I have not had the time to properly experiment, but it seems interesting. <a href="http://www.mapeditor.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapeditor.org/</a> edit: I forgot to add that it does isometric. I know that there are some peoples interested here.

I'd like to know, in the case anyone of you installed Tiled Map Editor (the one just pointed by Patrick C., <a href="http://www.mapeditor.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapeditor.org/</a>), if it also handles hexagonal grids.

It seems to be orthogonal and isometric only, but I did not really explore further.

There was a thread today on Pinnacle forum where this program was mentioned: <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~marcgacy/GBT/" rel="nofollow">http://home.earthlink.net/~marcgacy/GBT/</a> It seems to be easy and it does handle hexes grids. It seems that you can put your own elements into it (doors, furnitures, textures,...) because the default ones are quite plain. Maybe it would work for you?

Perhaps. Since you say that it handles hexes, I'll need to test it. After doing it I will be able to provide some feedback for those interested in that way of mapping.

I started using MapTool years ago with my online gaming. I used the map building tool in that program and have found it very easy to use with drag and drop qualities. Is there a learning curve? Yes, however I have found a curve in all map design software that I have used. This learning curve is not insurmountable and there are numerous online resources to help users. When I moved to Fantasy Grounds 2 for my deadlands campaign I still used MapTool to draw my maps and exported them to FG2. I plan on doing the same with Roll20.

Grayheon, I agree, MapTool is a viable choice as map creator as well. At least, that is what I saw few years ago; to my mind, it hadn't a high learning curve -- I mean just making maps for other VTTs, not setting up things like dynamic FoW and LoS.

Well, Maptool is not really a map making program. I love it as a VTT (and use it frequently for gaming), but as a map making program, it lacks a lot of the tools that can be found in graphic programs (GIMP, Photoshop,...) or dedicated mapping applications (ProFantasy software, Dundjinni,...). It is not a critic about Maptool, which is one of my favorites applications, but it seems to be the wrong tool for map making (IIRC, it doesn't even have an export command for the map as an image).

It lacks of a way of exporting maps as images? Ow. Of course, I wasn't comparing it to dedicated apps for mapping. All that I remember is that it was easy to arrange useful maps within MapTool, and the feature of "painting with tiles" was good. BTW, that "painting with tiles" ability is a thing that I can't replicate with Photoshop; I mean, to assign a full-color tile as a Brush for painting with it: if I select a tile and turn it into a Brush, all its instances are colorless; I'd like to circumvent this, but I'm not sure if it's possible to do it.

To "paint with tiles" in Photoshop, instead of turning your tile into a brush, turn it into a pattern. Then you can fill any space with your pattern.

Incidentally, while MapTool is not a mapmaking program as such, you can export the map as an image (it's a screenshot, but you can select the entire map). The only thing is, maps in MapTool are infinite, so it won't include the background, it will just export the map zoomed to the point where it can see anything you've put on it. This doesn't make it suitable as a mapmaker, though - it's not made to do that. Ultimately, for me, the best tools come down to Photoshop/Illustrator or GIMP/Inkscape.

I don't really understand. The export command in Maptools seems to only export in the Maptool map format. How can you export in an image format? Taking a screenshot can, of course, be done with any program, with anything on the screen, but it only takes what is visible on screen at the moment.... How could you take the entire map?

The program has an Export Screenshot feature, with an option to capture the current view or the entire map. I've attached a couple images to show. The first one was the current view (zoomed in for some detail), which is a roughly 700x700 image. The second image I captures without changing my view or anything, but just selecting "Entire Map" instead of "Current View." That one is the entire map, at about 1300x1300. I did have a background texture on the map too, but as mentioned, since MT infinitely tiles any image used as a map background (like grass, or ocean, etc.), it's excluded from the screenshot. The export feature is located in the File Menu.

To "paint with tiles" in Photoshop, instead of turning your tile into a brush, turn it into a pattern. Then you can fill any space with your pattern. Yes, I know . . . but that's not quite what I was searching for -- free hand tile-painting with the Brush tool. In any case, thanks.

I get it. I had never seen the "entire map" checkbox, so I was just exporting the current view. Thanks. I don't think I'll use it for map making, but who knows?

The results of the second and big MapTool screenshot look good to me.

To "paint with tiles" in Photoshop, instead of turning your tile into a brush, turn it into a pattern. Then you can fill any space with your pattern. Yes, I know . . . but that's not quite what I was searching for -- freehand tile-painting with the Brush tool. In any case, thanks. There is maybe a way, but a little more complicated. - turn the tiles you are going to use into patterns - make a new layer and fill it with the pattern for each pattern you are going to use - add a layer mask to each layer and fill the mask with black Now, if you go on any layer mask with a white brush, you'll be painting with the brush you choose and with the pattern you have made. I sometimes use this to place cross-hatchs on drawings, but I am not sure that it is what you are searching for. The advantage is that painting in white on the mask adds the pattern whilst painting in black erase it, and moreover you can choose any brush to work. I hope it helps.

Interesting. Perhaps the results can be close to what I want to achieve by means of free hand tile painting, although by means of following a very different path. I'll study these steps.

I don't have any experience with dundjinni, but no one has mentioned dungeonographer yet (<a href="http://www.dungeonographer.com" rel="nofollow">www.dungeonographer.com</a>), which I quite like.