FGU and Campaign Cartographer

[Morfedel]

So, I have Campaign Cartographer, which I've used to create maps for gaming in. Frankly, I'm not all that good at it, but it's what I have.

Anyway, often I've made maps that I thought would look good (for my skill level), and would add it into a campaign I'm running. Then I'd load it up, and it would be GIGANTIC and zooming in would cause it to look awful and pixilated. I'm assuming this has something to do with the size of the map directly, or the file size, or something. I would maybe make, for example, a 200' by 200' map as campaign cartographer has things set, so I'd have a 40x40 5-foot-square map, thinking from other maps I've seen in FG that this would be reasonable, but obviously its not working out that way.


If anyone has experience with this and can tell me what I need to do to fix this in the future, I'd be most appreciative for the advice.

[Sulimo]

I use Campaign Cartographer as well.

What I do is create the map in CC3+. From there, I save it as JPG, and set it as 5000x5000 pixels at a resolution of 500 pixels per inch, and a hieght/width of 10 inches.

https://i.imgur.com/ty0ZPn3.png

From there, I use another tool like GIMP or even Paint to resize it to something fitting a 2k screen (1920x1080). Usually I only set one side to something like 980 for the height (that gives 100 pixels for the FGU interface bits), and let the app I am editing it in choose the width automatically.

You'll want to play around with the settings to get something that is acceptable to you.

While FGU can accept larger pictures than FGC, you still have to consider how long that picture will take to transfer to your players, the larger the file size, the longer it will take to transfer.

[LordEntrails]

By default, CC3+ exports maps to image files at relatively low resolution, maybe something like 1200x1200 pixels. You need to change the export options so that you are exorting at 50 or 100 pixels per 5 foot square. If you check the PF forums, there is a discussion from myself at Mattekure (?) on a macro that automatically calculates and exports a selected rectangle at a set resolution (like 50 or 100 pixels per square).

You can of course export at any resolution you want, you just have to set your options according to what you are going to export. Also note, if you are going to export very large images, you might need to change/oad some behind the scenes application settings. Again you can find that on the PF forums.

[Zacchaeus]

For a 200x200 (with a 5ft grid) map I'd export it at 2000x2000 .jpg 75% quality at 50% antialias with crop aspect and restrict image to border ticked. You could export as a .png and then re-export as a .jpg from Photoshop or similar since that sometimes gives you slightly better quality.