Watabou City Maps in Wonderdraft | Icarus Games
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2019
- i'm not a huge fan of using 3D building assets for maps, I prefer something top down, so this week I'm showing you how to use the watabou generator to make city assets for wonderdraft.
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Watabou City Generator: watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
Making Maps with Watabou: • How to Make Simple Cit...
Avoro 4.0: www.cartographyassets.com/ass...
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Honestly, your videos should be included with the wonderdraft tool. Incredible mapmaking tips. About to design a city myself!
That's wonderful praise, thank you!
Wish we had the tools to do this all within wonderdraft. A city-building module with some simple city-block and building-cluster polygons would be amazing.
If I get the time over the next couple weeks I'm going to try to put together an asset pack of watabou sections.
@@IcarusGames
Please do!
@@IcarusGames still waiting
I cannot like this comment enough. It would be so helpful.
@Icarus Games By the gods, I need this so much!
This video is exactly what I needed. Just picked up Wonderdraft at the weekend to help me get moving on my D&D 5e campaign. I'd have been lost and mucking around for days without this kind of guidance. Cheers for doing such a sterling job!
Thank you for making this tutorial! I just recently started using Wonderdraft but I really love it. This solves my issue with it though since I can make a town without having to switch to Inkarnate constantly.
Had never heard of Watabou before seeing it mentioned on Reddit. Immediately found your video when looking up how to use it and I'd like to thank you very much for providing this tutorial. The combination of these tools will keep me occupied for a VERY long time.
I have always tried to do this in photoshop ... wonderdraft seems like such a faster, better optimized tool for this sort of thing. Great video, love to see other mapmakers doing their thing and adding to the community!
For the whitespace deleting process you can just uncheck contiguous and lower the tolerance and it should select all of the white in the image at once
Revently got Wonderdraft and using your videos have been the most useful so far.
Thanks for putting the effort into this + subscribed!
This is awesome. I've been eyeing up Wonderdraft for a nicer campaign map than my Hexographer one and was wondering if I could do cities with it, too. This was super helpful. Thank you and greetings from Salford.
Just wanted to say your vids have been super helpful for me man. Being cooped up inside due to covid-19 events have given me a lot of time to work on my TTRPG worldbuilding and after finding Wonderdraft through your channel and watching your vids it's really given me something to get out of bed to work on and get enthusiastic for.
Hope your channel grows well dude, your content is quality and you have a great teaching manner. Thank you!
Thank you for such a lovely comment! I'm really glad you've been enjoying the content!
I use watabu and wonderdraft but never thought to combine them! Great stuff!
Thank you very much for taking your time creating this kind of content. Was looking for a way to do exactly what you are showing of here.
Also nice format. Streamlined, short and explains everything one needs to now for the process.
This was super helpful, I just recently got wonderdraft and saw this in my feed.
Magic wand tool with “contiguous” off will save you loads of time. Thanks for this tutorial!
+1, contiguous off is what you want. This tutorial really helped me make my first map, so thank thank thank you!
+1 came here to say this!
is there simmilar command for that in gimp? I dont have PS but downloaded gimp to do this specifically but i dont see anything like contiguous off. :(
@@matthewhughes1950 I realise this was two months ago but select > select by colour will often fultil the same function.
Thank you for this tip! I'm a total noob with Photoshop and you just saved me all the time!
I am so late in the game for this video, but THANK YOU! I never thought of using Watabou City Generator! Thanks again!
A wizard is never late...
I'm glad you enjoyed the video :)
Fantastic video, this has answered a few of my big questions with creating assets!
Glad it was helpful! I'll be doing a video on assets reviewing some of my favourite community ones in the near future.
This is amazing, I'm 100% gonna do this for the world setting I'm building atm. Thank you for the inspiration.
Glad you found it useful :)
Thank you!
Just getting started making maps. Thank you for the tutorial. It was very helpful.
This pretty much gave me exactly what I was looking for. I just ran Session Zero for a group last night and they wanted to have the campaign set in a one densely-packed city. Watabu is great for making those on the fly, but the cities it generated were too small for what we were thinking and didn't have options for what we wanted to add, like multiple layers of walls and a Venetian-style canal system. I've spent most of today trying to beat my copy of Worldographer into the task, but it would take over an hour to generate a city of the appropriate size, and even then it looked more like a suburb with how spread out all the buildings were. Your solution is pretty genius, though.
I'm glad you found the video helpful!
Great Video!!! Lots of info... BTW If you toggle off the contigous button at the top (in PhotoSHop) it will select ALL white spaces or whatever color you are selecting. Just faster and cleaner. Hope that helps...
Thanks so much for this tutorial. Made a big city map for a friend, and it was so simple and fun.
Glad you found it helpful!
Always love these!
this is freaking awesome
Mate, I am in the middle of making a map and figuring out cities and names for my own story, so seeing something like this is a dream come true! Thank you so much. I don't have PS or anything like that, but maybe one day I'll be able to edit. But, dude, your work is amazing.
Get GIMP. It's free and will do everything you would use PS for for this!
@@IcarusGames I don't know much on GIMP. But after looking it up just now I was surprised to see it free considering what it offers. Thank you so much, man. You're a champion.
Good luck with it :)
This is fantastic I will have to try it once I have wonderdraft. Making my own city has always been the worst
Broooo! Thanks for this amazing tutorial!
You can select by colour range to get all of the white area selected in 3 clicks. It'll save a tonne of time
Really good video and very well presented. Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Thanks for all the wonderful tutorials! Just a tip: when you are deleting the white space from the Watabou map in Photoshop, you can just click on 'select' in the top menu, 'color range' and then click on any of the white space on the map.
I had a blank and totally forgot about that when filming :P it is much easier that way though.
@@IcarusGames Or Export as SVG, open in any vector graphics software and export a PNG from there with a transparent canvas.
FYI if you go into Select -> Colour Range (select a colour with the pipette)-> ok then press delete you can remove all of that colour in one go. So for white space/background you can do it all in 1 :)
Somehow I always forget about the colour range feature! It does speed up the process though.
As someone who uses Gimp, People in GIMP can simply use the select by color tool, and have the tolerance adjusted via mouse to get the perfect selection.
Yeah I was highly confused why select by color wasn't used. That makes all stuff like walls and shanty town meaningless too. Just select by color my dudes :)
This is extremely useful
Glad it was helpful!
You can also select all and set color to Alpha and select white as the color to be set to alpha
This is awesome thank you
Great video man! Subbed!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Amazing!!
Looks great! I hope wonderdraft builds in city support
That's the dream!
Once I get a computer I definitely want to do something like this.
Great idea. One thing I would suggest is when you are in Photoshop, cut out each district/city block so you can and import them as separate assets. Would allow you to mix and match by district rather than by city
This is something that I've been meaning to do for a while: take a variety of parts of different watabou maps and make smaller city block assets so that I can make custom mega cities.
I will be redoing my custom assets video in future so I think I'll do it for that!
I'd suggest, rather than having to fumble with the wond, use your blending modes & multiply, or devise, out the white. You'd likely want to place a blank layer under it all.
Awesome! Im definitely going to give this a shit. I hand crafted a city based off of one i generated from donjon and was not pleased with how it looked with the prebuilt assets. using this and blending the colors looks way better imo
I'd recommend taking it out for dinner first! Seriously though, it is an effective method.
@@IcarusGames No idea why my autocorrect changed try to shit, but in retrospect, thats some quality comedy :p
Use it as inspiration. A post apocalypse setting where it's used as currency because of its fertilizer properties :p
I *think* their URL indicates that the site's name is Watabout.it.... as in "What-about-it?"
Great tutorial -- thank you for this
@1:12 that's a nice miniaturised version of France lol!
The one thing I think Watabou could really benefit from is the option to have grid based settlements/rectangular blocks. This would make it valid not only for say modern American style cities, but more desirably far east asian cultures such as Japan, China and Korea, who's cities were predominantly grid based (also add canals/moats).
Quick shortcut: To delete all the white space a little faster, go to the top menu, click "Select --> Color Range."
A window will pop up, and you'll have an eyedropper curser. Click the white, and it will select everything that's white. Hit "Ok" and you'll have all the white in the pic selected at once! Delete, and done.
any tipps for a megalopolois? (a very very very large city, where 1 district is like a whole city?)
There’s an easier way to delete white space at the layer level. Simply double click the layer, move the white selector left towards on the layer and the white will disappear instantly and nearly perfectly.
I shit a brick when I found this video. I am so excited about this. Thank you for this tutorial!!!!!!!
Wow this is awesome! Anyway we could get access to the assists you’ve already done?
If you check out cartographyassets.com a user has already bundled up some watabou sets! :D
Great video! Turn off Contiguous for the Magic Wand selection tool and you're golden. In fact, you'd missed some bounded white space between some buildings because you didn't have Contiguous turned off.
Aye, you can use select colour range to achieve the same - makes the whole process much quicker!
lol! Yes, that is another way, as well... I like using that one in more "fuzzier" situations. Been using Photoshop for 25 years and I still learn new techniques for doing things; it's such a powerful tool.
Anyway, it's a great tutorial you got. Do you know if it's linked anywhere by the creator of Wonderdraft?
I believe the Wonderdraft subreddit has a link to my playlist in the sidebar. :)
I Would love to see what values you have for "Ground Brushes" i don't really got any good colors for mine so would really love to see them!
For this I was using the Avoro theme, which you can grab for free here: www.cartographyassets.com/assets/avoro.8/
Its got dozens of built in colours for all types of grounds and they look really nice!
If you're not familiar with installing themes in WD, I recommend picking up the Mythkeeper asset manager: www.cartographyassets.com/assets/mythkeeper.68/
what are u using for those ground textures. they look so good. omfg.
When I go to the site the "layout" section with citadel, walls, plaza, coast and so on is greyed out and I can't turn any of them on or off.
I thought you were going Canadian there for a second. What aboot a city map, eh? ;)
Watabou is pretty neat for ideas for towns and such but i hate how they have so many houses that are triangles and stuff with slanted edges, it always looks really weird if you make your town actually like like that.
I agree! This was made better in an update to Watabou around the time this video came out; there's now an "Elevation" setting in layout that gets rid of a lot of this!
I'm still looking for a good Wall tool for constructing fortified towns and cities. Any suggestions?
What a great straightforward explanation! What is the purpose of having two layers in PS though? Is one all one really needs? I'm a PS novice so I may be missing the point.
I usually use the second layer to throw some color down and check I've deleted all the white properly.
@@IcarusGames Nice. Good check to do.
Awesome vid dude!
Your volume is very low though :)
Thanks. Volume is something that I still struggle with. I've got great big speaks so don't notice the difference in volume a lot of the time :s I'm trying to get better though.
there's a bit more complexity with the generator now, (yay support and development!) but the eraser tool and wand is leaving some annoying gaps for me when im editing. Any setting changes for the map soft that can make the process less painstaking? Ive resorted now to the 1 pixel eraser to get rid of that annoying line thats surrounding all the buildings.
Best way to get rid of the white is using the colour select tool, and then if need be expand your selection by 1 pixel.
Rly nice! This series are the best. Is it possible to get the edited city assets as a download link?
I'll try and figure out how we can get a community folder going so anyone can put completed ones in there!
Love what you were doing and got excited to try it out, but this doesn't work for me! Admittedly editing in ArtRage (Tried GIMP but too obtuse). Set up PNG in folder in relevant Wonderdraft Example...etc. folder. Some 'frightening' message about malformed folder and potential for errors. I will have to go back to hand drawing in ArtRage methinks.
Any suggestions for those of us who don't have photoshop to remove the white and other unwanted background stuff prior to making it an asset?
You can download GIMP, which is a free piece of software that will allow you to remove the white space in the image.
I love your videos. They are great tutorials on how to use Wonderdraft, and have helped me out quite a bit. I do have a question/challenge for you. I've got a town that is built on half on land, and half on docks. How would you go about building out docks/dockwork in Wonderdraft? Thanks!
Thanks a lot, professor!
This should work so long as you're not making commercial maps (license issues):
Google "dundjinni dock" which will give you plenty of png files of jetty and dock that you can load up as custom assets in WD and place like any other.
@@IcarusGames Good News Everyone! I'll use that tip! Thank again!
@@jeffreyfarnsworth4932 Dundjinni is a great source for all kinds of assets to make your maps more varied too.
you missed some white zones in the buildings layout.
Are you using tablet (Wacom or the like) to do your coloring and shading, or a mouse?
Where do you download the color asset packs?
It would speed up the process if you just colour selected all the white areas, rather than magic wanding it. Then you could leave shanty on.
Dumb question, but do you know if Microsoft Paint has any similar feature to the Magic Wand?
Benjamin Lampp I don't know about any. But the program called gimp does and it's free, so go check it out if it fits your needs
How do you add labels over the city asset, mines always go under it so i can't add labels in WD, how do you do it?
The labels default to being on top for me. Go into the layers option of WD - you should be able to adjust which things (symbols/labels etc) appear in which order there. If the problem carries on, I'd say post about it in the r/wonderdraft_support sub on reddit.
@@IcarusGames thank you!
this also works for the watabou town generator?
I was not provided with the examples folder and when i try to make my own with the same files as you've shown nothing seems to work.
Go to your humble bundle page where you download the .exe file from and the example folder should be there.
I love this and will use it to make my future cities. I am literally brand new to DND. But question, you kept mentioning Wonderdraft and the title says using Wonderdraft. But I didn’t see you use it?
So the city map (the boxes) are from the watabou website, but the program I used to make the actual map (add colours, water etc) was wonderdraft.
Icarus Games oh I misunderstood, thought that was photoshop. Thank you for response!
For some reason my cities are appearing in wonderdraft as tiny, and I can only scale them down, not up.
i dont see any of these options when i right click the map
ummm, you know you can download these cities as SVG, right? as in a vector graphic. And it is layered so that you can remove the background at will, and colour it in as you please.
What program do you use that shows them in layers?
@@IcarusGames I use Inkscape. Download the map in SVG. Every building is a seperate entity, Nested inside each block, wich is nested within a district. The wall is a seperate entity as well as the roads. Sorry for the snooty tone of my first reply. That was uncalled for.
Adobe Illustrator makes it a piece of cake to remove extraneous assets and allows you to create layers if desired. It also lets you see each building and path perfectly.
I don't know what I'm missing. I've followed every step to the letter and I can't get my png file to show up in the symbols section
Try asking r/wonderdraft_support over on Reddit.
Alright so at 7:20 is where I get lost. I have done the city portion from watabou, made the png. But when I go to place the symbols I don't have them available as a symbol, despite having placed them in similar files as you have. (Though is required making some) Is there a step in set-up that I missed with wonderdraft with adding your own symbols to the program?
AMMENDMENT: I halfly figured it out by downloading a set of maps, where the zipped file already contained the apparent thing I was missing was a .wonderdraft_symbols file that coordinated them to be added to the symbols within the program. Ugh. *headdesk*
@@xFyreWytchx Yeah the wonderdraft file structure is really specific. I downloaded the example assets folder just because it's properly structured.
@@IcarusGames Pretty much what I ended up doing while screeching into the nether. *reeeeeee* But now things are fine.Though I do notice my city symbol is not gray, but gold. Weird.
When using the land color wand on wonderdraft it is possible to just have it color symbols, is there some magic way to make the building colorable with this?
Yes there's a filter on the right under advanced options when you have the brush selected.
But is it possible to color the watabou buildings?
It is, you can import the buildings as a paintable asset, but it will colour all the buildings the same colour.
I will be doing a whole video on assets in WD soon.
I look forward to it! I've been adding in NATO style division symbols and was having trouble making the assets themselves colorable.
So I'm at a bit of a loss here. I've saved my map in my symbols\watabou folder in Wonderdraft but it's not coming up as a set to load in the program.
Wonderdraft requires a very specific file structure. The easiest way to do it is to pick up MYTHKEEPER, which is a 3rd party asset loader. There are some watabou assets on there. If you install those through MYTHKEEPER, then you can navigate to the folder than makes and out your watabou assets in too.
just nitpic on the worldbuilding, where does the city get it's food from? Aint no farms here ;P
Underground fungus stores, clearly :P Just kidding - as this example was just to show off the combination of watabou/wonderdraft I gave zero consideration to the worldbuilding of it. If I were making this for my game I would spend more time on the minor details.
Maybe from villages a few miles away?
Or that big body of water over there?
That big empty area on the left could be also used for pastures, and the buildings next to it as barns.
Be a bit more creative than that. Not just farms can be food sources, and many settled, or semi-settled civilizations used alternatives historically.
At about 7:14, you mention and show how you've created a Symbols set called Watabou. How did you do that? I've followed the rest of your instructions about copying the PNG into the right folder, but it doesn't show up in Wonderdraft.
Best thing to do is grab the example assets folder that comes as a separate download on the humble link and place that in the user folder; it has the proper folder structure. You can then navigate to the symbols folder in that and place your assets.
Because I had this problem: even though he said it comes with Wonderdraft, that isn't technically true; the Example Custom Assets folder "comes with Wonderdraft" because the download link you get for wonderdraft when you buy it includes a download link for "Example_Custom_Assets" under it; so go back to your email from when you bought Wonderdraft, download that and install it, it makes adding your own assets in the program infinitely easier.
So annoying that there still isn't an easy to use program dedicated to city building. CC3 is very difficult
Right now I'm struggling to put my world together. Already has its own set of rules. I planned to make 3 types of cities. Medieval based tech cities. Cities like our modern day, and cyberpunk type cities. But I'm realizing our modern type won't really fit in or make sense. So I'm thinking about doing medieval types and some have advanced technology. The others is cyberpunk type cities.
For the fusion of medieval fantasy and more tech based stuff, take a look at the Eberron setting from D&D, it blends those elements.
But how do you get them to show up in Wonderdraft?!
Thanks for the video Icuras, I have just used this technique to generate a couple of City maps and whilst the first took multiple hours to work out the how, the 2nd just took 1.
I do have a question though. I would like to add some hand draw shapes to look like parts of the city that comes out of watabou. Does anybody know how to make sprites with simple shapes and a border into PNGs?
Glad you found it helpful. I'm actually going to redo my video on importing assets into Wonderdraft in a couple of weeks (it's due to go live September 4th) and I will probably use some basic shapes as part of the example.
@@IcarusGames Thank you. I will look forward to it.
couple of questions, 1 did you ever build that city asset pack? 2. you took colour and B&W images but I only saw you using B&W. Was that a specific reason?
I still haven't gotten around to building out an asset pack, but there's a set of watabou assets on cartographyassets.com
I took both to have the options, but only ended up using the B&W
I recently acquired wonderdraft and the watabou assest from cartography assets. Had used others from the site with no issues but no matter where i put the watabou files they're not showing in my wonderdraft symbols. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Tried having it's own folder like the site suggested, then tried putting them in another folder with ones that work. Nothing. Not sure what to do
The simplest thing to try is to run Wonderdraft in admin mode so it generates the information file needed. If that doesn't work, I put out an up to date tutorial on installing custom assets a few weeks ago that will hopefully fix the issues for you :)
@@IcarusGames Thank you! I'll try both out when I get home :)
How did you get Avoro to register with Wonderdraft? I followed the 2 instructions that Avoro gave, but it isn't showing up as an option for a theme in Wonderdraft
I installed it via MYTHKEEPER, the 3rd party program for installing assets and themes.
@@IcarusGames Thanks!
For some reason, I am not able to find the Watabou maps I made after I placed them in the files from the video. I even tried a basic overlay and that didnt work either so I am very confused.
Try running the program as an administrator, and double check that you've placed the files in the correct file structure.
If you're still struggling, MYTHKEEPER is a 3rd party asset importer and there are some watabou maps on there you can bring into the program and then add more assets to the folder that is made by MYTHKEEPER.
@@IcarusGames i tried running it as admin and looked back at your previous video about adding assets to make sure I had all the necessary files and locations, but unfortunately didn't work. Ill try using Mythkeeper though. Thanks for your help!
It's tricky because WD is so particular about file structure and asset importing. If you still have no luck, the best place to ask is the Megasploot discord server. There's a link in the video description.
Okay any time I hope onto the page I do not get a custom city from the Watabou city generator. Is there something that I need to make it appear?
Hmmmm. Have you tried from a different browser or Google watabou and follow the Google link and see if that works. Usually you go to the site and it generates a city right away.
@@IcarusGames yeah I just figured out if I shut off Brave's ad block it will let me play with the map.
@@Snowman0147 Of course! I didn't even think about an ad blocker being the issue.
@@IcarusGames neither did I.
How did you get all of those preset colors
They come from the theme. Avoro 4.0 is my favourite for the ground colour palette.
How do you do top down walls tho? not those from watabu.
You can use the straight path tool within WD.
Icarus Games i ended up using the “modern roads” assets pack and a rescaled “towers pack”. It’s slower than the path tool but looks better IMO. I still hope someone either makes a “wall path” or they actually implement a wall tool like they do for DungeonDraft.
how do i rasterize a layer in gimp? anything ive read is very misleading
I *believe* you do so in the layers panel by right clicking and selecting "Discard Text Information" which doesn't get rid of the text but rasterizes the image. It's been a long while since I've used gimp though so I'm not 100% on that.
How do import these city maps?
I show how to load them as custom assets around 6 minutes into the video. I'll be doing a dedicated video on importing assets soon.
@@IcarusGames I have seen mythkeeper coming along a few times, but for some reason I just can't get it right. Until that time I'll be waiting for the video on that topic.
i don't really understand how you do to get the file to be like, bigger.. my Watabu map end up being pretty small in the end :-(
Wonderdraft doesn't let you up scale images beyond their original size.
Probably the best thing to do is download your image as an svg file from watabou, then bring it into a larger Photoshop canvas and size it there before saving. That should mean your end image is larger in Wonderdraft and can be shrunk down as needed.
@@IcarusGames I could also try to re-size the picture itself in gimp right ?
That should work, yeah!
@@IcarusGames And it does work ! Thank you nontheless for the videos !
Also, for a watabu map, when i try to place some color / texture over the custom symbol that is the map, the whole map gets colored
Is there something i'm doing wrong ?
That is probably because in your brush tool in WD you've got "symbols" selected. You can toggle whether to colour the ground, trees, mountains, or symbols on their own.
what if we dont have photoshop? any suggestions?
You can use GIMP, which is free.
Icarus Games ok, thanks. does it have an ez select tool kinda like ps with its magic wand?
Icarus Games ok cool, also another question, when I download an asset from reddit, will it still have the background its plastered onto? or will it just be the 2d model of the asset?
If you download it as an asset that's made for WD other should have no background and be good to go.
Is there any way to get your watabou assets? 😊
Someone else has put some together on cartography assets: cartographyassets.com/assets/4996/watabu-assets-for-wonderdraft/
@@IcarusGames cool thx for the quick response
@@IcarusGames you know what that could be: i can change the colore of mountains and trees if i set them to sample_color but i can't change buildings like those you used in your videos.... :(
@@outlawmonkey Run WD in admin mode and it *should* generate the .txt file in your assets folder to go in and change the color type for the buildings.
@@IcarusGames yeah, i did that and changed the color type to sample_color but it doesn't work. so i thaught that there must be a nother trick
watabou? Ha the treespirit
... and then make this into 3D.
Could you do a video on doing this with Cityograph? cityographer.com/
I can certainly take a look!