Advice on creating maps in Roll20?

Hello! I'm just popping in here for some quick advice! I have been working on a small private campaign for my friends and I for a while, but I am just now about to start implementing the maps and things into the game. I have many of them planned on graph paper, but I want some advice on what you think is the best way to bring these into the game! I am planning on starting a subscription closer to the time that we play this because I have made a lot of artwork for the characters and events and I will need the storage space. So, I will most likely have access to assets and things! However, I am an artist and I have already made my own player/enemy tokens and things. I am wondering if I should just make my own tiles?? Or--would it be smarter to just make the entire map on photoshop and upload it as a background? In theory, I could just upload an image of my map on a grid and play it that way but... I put a lot of work into the rest of the artwork! Even if its not EXACTLY the same style, I just want it to look nice and be in color to match the quality of rest of the artwork. I will get access to the assets as well at some point. So, would it be wiser to just use those and save myself time? I tried messing around with online assets and I'm just a little confused because everything sticks to the grid so perfectly. With the premium assets, are we able to have like... a round wall or things that don't perfectly fit to the grid? What is your experience with this and what do you recommend? Thank you for all of your time!

for the "stick to grid" problem right click on the token - advanced - is drawing disables it in this menu you can also flip tokens, set the layer of the token, push it to front or back etc how you make your maps is totally to your liking. you can create nice maps with the ingame possibilities, marketplace offers some high quality stuff and additions, but you can use a third party program like dungeon painter studio or draw your own maps too and upload them.  

In general, depending on the complexity, you will get better performance assembling your map outside of Roll20 and uploading it in one piece (or 2-4, if it is very large). Many tiles and assets in the marketplace allow you to download the individual graphics for this purpose. If in doubt, shoo the artist a PM and ask. I too am an artist by trade, but I prefer to either buy or adapt my gaming graphics from existing art if possible. It makes much more sense spend my time making art for money than making stuff for myself, more's the pity.

Re: snap to grid - hold down ALT while placing. You will be able to place things wherever you want.

Also, if you are going to be subscribing at the Pro level and have access to the API, I'd recommend creating your maps in Photoshop with your walls on on layer and your doors on another later and everything else on different layers than those two, because Aaron's walls API script makes dynamic lighting setup a SNAP!

One thing that really bothers me about building a map using the various tilesets is that when you drag a tile onto the map layer, it's always the wrong size (usually 2x3 or 3x3).  Is there no way to have the tiles be the correct size when you drag them from the art library?

Asgorath said: One thing that really bothers me about building a map using the various tilesets is that when you drag a tile onto the map layer, it's always the wrong size (usually 2x3 or 3x3).  Is there no way to have the tiles be the correct size when you drag them from the art library? If they are all the same size, you can create a deck of cards with all those tiles in it and set the display card size as the appropriate size.  Then you can just take cards from the deck and put them on the map layer.

Finderski said: If they are all the same size, you can create a deck of cards with all those tiles in it and set the display card size as the appropriate size. &nbsp;Then you can just take cards from the deck and put them on the map layer. They are not the same size in general, here are a couple of examples: <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/807/save" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/807/save</a>... <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/975/save" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/975/save</a>... <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1412/sav" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1412/sav</a>... Am I just doing something wrong, or is there really no way for a tile that is marked as 7x8 to actually show up as 7x8 when I drag it out?&nbsp; Creating maps using these tilesets would be significantly easier if all the tiles were the intended size right away. Edit: It's particularly bad with these "Vile Tiles" sets, for example: <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1592/vil" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1592/vil</a>... I absolutely love the artwork on all of these, but creating maps with them gets pretty frustrating when you have to manually fix the size of every single tile.

I think if you drag them directly onto the map layer from the desktop, they come in at size. But dragging from the library or to the token layer, no.

keithcurtis said: I think if you drag them directly onto the map layer from the desktop, they come in at size. But dragging from the library or to the token layer, no. But dragging them from the desktop means they count against my file upload quota, right?&nbsp; If that's actually the case, why can't the premium assets from the art library just do the right thing as well?&nbsp; Seems strange that the server can't figure out what size the tiles should be.

This script might be of some help.

I've been doing right click -&gt; Advanced -&gt; Set Dimensions -&gt; Units (instead of Pixels) and manually changing the size to 5x7 or whatever, I just don't understand why this can't be done automatically.&nbsp; I checked a couple of the individual tiles, and the images in Gabriel Pickards tilesets are correctly sized for 1 unit = 140 pixels.&nbsp; So, when I drag one of these onto the map layer, why can't it check the size and automatically set the token size to the correct thing based on the original image size?&nbsp; It seems strange to default to anything other than 100% of the original image, especially for map tokens/tiles. Edit: I guess the correct size is 1 unit = 70 pixels, based on the wiki.&nbsp; I'd be happy to have to manually shrink the tile in half each time for cases like this, rather than having to figure out exactly what the correct dimensions should be. Edit: Actually, according to this, 140 pixels is the correct size for map tiles: <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Creating_Marketplace_Asset" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Creating_Marketplace_Asset</a>... So yeah, if the map layer expects correctly-sized maps or map tiles, I don't understand why these images can't just automatically be the correct size when you drag them from the art library.

I guess for now I'll live with this macro: !token-mod --set width|?{Width} height|?{Height} !token-mod --set width|*70 height|*70 I still need to know what the correct size is, but at least it's way faster to fix than going in and doing it manually (or dragging it to the right size).

I’m a little late but I wanted to say thank you all so much for all the helpful feedback and advice! :) I’m super excited to start putting it all together and I’m so grateful for all the help.

Asgorath said: I guess for now I'll live with this macro: !token-mod --set width|?{Width} height|?{Height} !token-mod --set width|*70 height|*70 I still need to know what the correct size is, but at least it's way faster to fix than going in and doing it manually (or dragging it to the right size). Could this be written as: !token-mod --set width|[[?{Width}*70]] height|[[?{Height}*70]] It would be great to have a script or even core functionality that brings in items at a specific size, but I'm not sure it's possible. One creator could creat a graphic intended to be viewed at 140 dpi, another at 280, something from the web at 72, 96 or 300 for the most common resolutions or "flip the coin" for somebody who didn't really care about how their work was going to be used in such an environment. Roll20 has some guidance about asset resolution, but doesn't enforce it. Ultimately, it would be nice if every asset had a standardized "a_x_b" ending to their name indicating the number of units an asset was supposed to take up on the board, regardless of the pixel dimensions. The system could parse that and size the asset accordingly on placement. But even that would be problematic for games which don't use a 5 foot grid. In short, I don't think what you want is possible given the variety of sources and options available.

Even if all the artists used exactly 140dpi everywhere, there isn't sufficient information in the API to do this as there is no way to know the native resolution of the image.

The Aaron said: Even if all the artists used exactly 140dpi everywhere, there isn't sufficient information in the API to do this as there is no way to know the native resolution of the image. Not sure if resolution really matters in that case. Resolution is pixel per inch (or any other length dimension), and we don't really care about the inch size in this case. We just need the image width in pixel. I'd love to see some kind of parsing of the name, like keithcurtis suggested: If the name contains any size information like " a _x_ b ", this should be interpreted as units. So image_20_x_15 would be interpreted as an image with a size of 20 by 15 units. When the name doesn't contain any unit size information, roll20 could just assume a given resolution of 140dpi and scale the image according to that value.

Fair, I suppose I should have said image dimensions. =D There's a much upvoted suggestion for allowing the API access to the tags on an image which could facilitate this if the images had an NxM tag.

I think I upvoted that one already. But to be honest, I believe that should be part of roll20's functionality anyway, not something that people need to tweak in via API scripts...