Converting old map into a beautiful new one | World Building Timelapse | Grandia
10This is the map of Grandia, the fantasy world I've used as the setting for several short stories as well as 4 D&D campaigns across 5 years and over 120 sessions. I made the black & white version (shown in the beginning) back in 2015. The picture is from a couple years ago, and since then the map has gotten pretty beat-up because I haven't treated it well (carried it in bookbags back and forth from D&D sessions). I wanted to make a digital version of the map beyond just taking a picture of the original. I wanted to do justice to the initial map, of which my players and I have many fond memories.
I decided to use Wonderdraft after comparing it to Inkarnate and CC3. It was my first time using the software. I used it vanilla with no extra asset packs or brushes. It took me about 5.5 hrs, but I don't know my way around Wonderdraft so I probably missed a bunch of useful features. It helped that I had my old map to go off of, and I didn't want to make many alterations to the original.
Overall I'm happy with it, though its not without flaws. I didn't do a good job preserving the globe-like feel of the original, mainly because I wasn't sure how to use the software to crop the map to have anything besides a rectangular shape. Thus, I just extended the north and south poles across the width of the map. While not realistic, I think the map is something the inhabitants of the world would believe is accurate.
I didn't add too many features to the specific continents like cities, roads, or smaller rivers and lakes, because I plan to do individual continent maps next which will have those finer details. This map is for people to use when plotting courses between continents, and for the players to see the lay of the world.
Out of curiosity I did some crude math to figure out the scale of Grandia compared to Earth. The 4k image is 3840px wide, and the 4,000 mile scale is 410px wide, so that would put the circumference at the equator at ~37.4k mi (60.1k km). Earth is about ~24.8k mi (40k km), so Grandia is 50% bigger if my math checks out. This doesn't account for the map being 2D with nothing done to make it fit on a sphere. I came up with the initial scale size based on how long it takes travelers to traverse one of the known rivers going 40mi per 8hr travel turn when going with the current. With how rough my assumptions were, I'm happy how close it turned out to Earth, though I'm sure some of my calculations are wrong.
Anyhow, I hope you like it. I still love the original, but since my players and I play online now, it made sense to make a better quality digital version that I can easily share with them. Next up, continent maps!
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Total time elapsed: ~5.5 hrs
Software: Wonderdraft
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I rarely stream on Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/itsrossers
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All music by Alexander Nakarada.
Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Songs used, listed in order of appearance:
Adventure Beyond by Alexander Nakarada
Wintersong by Alexander Nakarada
Traveler by Alexander Nakarada
Heartbeat by Alexander Nakarada
Wanderer by Alexander Nakarada
Fantasy Motion by Alexander Nakarada
Wildlands by Alexander Nakarada
Tam Lin by Alexander Nakarada
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00:00 Original Map
00:10 Creating Landmasses
05:04 Paining Climate Colors
07:00 Mountains
10:50 Forests
13:55 Lakes & Rivers
17:45 Canyon
18:28 Nudging Trees
19:05 Hills
20:12 Sand Dunes
20:43 Marshes
21:26 Grasslands
22:00 Palm Trees
22:43 Rocks & Monuments
24:54 Compass
25:25 Mab Embellishments
26:18 Adding Location Names
29:05 Final Result
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At this time, Rossers has 162 views for Grandia spread across 1 video. His channel published less than an hour of Grandia content, roughly 1.72% of the content that Rossers has uploaded to YouTube.