How to create BATTLE MAPS in INKARNATE for Dungeons and Dragons

Hello and welcome back it’s strike here with another dnd video and today i’m going to be teaching you how to use incarnate’s new battle map creator incarnate has been a tool in the dungeons and dragons world for quite a while now with their regional and their world maps

But now they are moving into the world of battle map so let me show you how that works but before we get on to that i just want to let you know that i uploaded dnd videos here on youtube every monday and thursday so make sure to subscribe

If you want to improve your game and take part in dnd discussions so to show you incarnates of battle map creator i’m going to jump into the computer so once you have logged into incarnate you will have to click to create a new map and this is the

First thing that you’re going to see before we get on i’m just going to also say that the version i’m using here is the paid version so the free version i think has a lot less assets and stuff like that but i don’t even think the paid version

Is that much i can’t remember exactly how much but i don’t think it’s that much and you get a lot more assets and stuff like that so have a look at both to decide which way you want to use it but this is the paid one that i’m going to

Be showing you here on the left you’ll see all the different types of maps that you can make so there’s regional world parchment world and fancy regional world or classic sorry but the one that we want for this is the fantasy battle map and if you flip through here you can see

Some of the examples that you can make this one’s pretty cool but yeah some of the examples that you can make using this tool once you’ve got that selected just go ahead and click choose style it will then ask you what size you want the document to be

I’m just going to stick with digital landscape for this but you can make it all different sizes and there’s a custom one there to make it whichever size you want it to be and then this is what you will see if you’ve used incarnate in the past it’s going to look very familiar

But i’m going to be making this video as if you’ve never seen it before and i’m going to go through absolutely everything so don’t worry if you haven’t seen incarnate before but something i want to mention first is that they’ve left quite a few tools in here from

Their world builder that you would never actually really use to make a battle map and the first one is the one that you actually load into and that’s this sort of cutting tool or the dig tool i like to call it i was called the mask

Tool so this is where you would put your land masses if you were doing a large world but you’re not really going to be putting down land masses because it’s all one landmass usually for a battle map but if you wanted to you could just

Fill it all out just like that so that it is all one landmass but if you didn’t do that it doesn’t matter either the rest of it will still work just fine so let’s just quickly go around the screen and explain what everything is so this first one here is the select

Tool like most tools have and up here you can select what you wanted to select so for example if i only wanted to select the text but the text is overlaying something else i could click text and then it will make sure that when i click and drag or when i

Just click it it will only highlight and select the text it’s always handy to mention as well that there’s an undo button just here in case you do make a mistake this one here is the mask tool that you’re not really going to use while you’re making a battle map so don’t

Worry too much about that one and then as we go down again this is the brush tool so this one’s a bit more important this is where you put down your land so on the right here you can see what you’ve selected and then you can just draw it as simple as that

We’re going to come back to this one a little bit later i’m just going to quickly go through what they all are and then we’ll go into them all a bit more in depth so this stamp tool here is where you would select your assets and then you can place them down and

There’s some cool things about this which are a bit different to other tools that we’ll go through as well this is your text tool so you can put text down and so you can change it and stuff we’ll also go through that a bit later and then this one here is

Called the path tool and really you wouldn’t use this in a battle map there might be some applications i haven’t thought of but basically you can draw where the paths are and you can do different types of lines and stuff so i’m not really going to go through this tool

If there are any cool uses of this that you can think of in your battle maps and do let me know in the comments and then the next one is the note tool so you can put down points on your map and then write notes on the right here i’m not going to

Go too much into this one either because we’re just going to be talking about how to actually make a map in the tool but just know that you can put notes on your map as well if you want to and then the next one down is the grid

Tool which is pretty important for making your battle maps if you use a grid so we’ll go through that as well and then this last one here is the pan and zoom but while you’re on any of these you can use the scroll wheel to go in and out so

You probably won’t need to go here too much unless you need to move the map around like so and then right down in the bottom left here is where you’ll save it it does not auto save so make sure to save regularly so you don’t lose any changes that you’ve made

And if you hover over it it does tell you how many changes since the last save as well and then along the bottom here there’s the export button so that will export it as a png once you’re done with the map the shortcuts which i would definitely suggest clicking on and just learning

Some of these i think using shortcuts in tools like these makes it much more smoother much more easy to do so learn how to go between the different tools with the buttons here and do the add and subtract of mask tool and stuff like that

Will just make it a lot easier for you to make your maps and then here they’ve got the zoom and you can just click fit to screen if you have somehow ended up off here or something you can click fit to screen and then it will move it back

Like so and then on the right this panel will change depending on what tool you have selected so we’re going to go through all of them now so we are going to start with the brush tool because that makes the most sense when you’re making a map to

Actually put the terrain down so the first thing to bring to your attention is that there is a foreground layer and a background layer here if you have used the mask tool to put a mask over the top then you want to use foreground and then

You can draw on the foreground but if i go to background you’ll see that i cannot draw on the background but if i did not use the mask tool to put the terrain down in the first place then when you come to the brush tool you want to use the background

Layer and you can draw on that but once again you cannot draw on the foreground if you do that so we’re just going to stick what we started with and we’re going to draw on the foreground so the next thing that you’ll need to know are these different shapes i’m just

Going to draw a little squiggly line for each of them so that’s your circle which is your normal tool i guess you would say and then this shape here if i draw it for you it’ll make more sense what it is so it adds a bit of roughness to the outside

And then this here will draw like a square like a grid if we start going through the circular brush you can see you can change the size here and there are the shortcuts and then the opacity here and there are the shortcuts and then the softness here so the softness

If you see here the if i scroll in it might help actually you can see that the edges just around here blend in to the grassy bit around the edge but if i took the softness all the way down to zero and drew you’ll see that that isn’t the

Case so hopefully seeing them side by side makes sense what the softness is so you can set your softness between zero and one to whatever you like and then the opacity is exactly what it you think it is it’s how seafood is so you can see that that is barely

Showing over the top of this and that i’m going to show you how to use that a bit later to give the textures a bit more realism to them and then the size is exactly what it says so you can make it really big like this

And go over everything so if we go to the edge brush now you’ll see the exact same size and opacity but it’s something a bit different here and that’s the feature size and if i just scroll this up for you you’ll see that it changes the look of your brush

So the lower it is the more circular it is and then as you get higher it makes it a bit more jagged so let me put them onto the map so you can see the difference so this is the more circular one and then if i go up here and i put it

Right to the top this is the more jagged one so you can see the difference and hopefully you can work out why you might want to use this one over this one and then if you’re using the square tool it just has a size and opacity which do the exact same as

You would expect them to do now something you may have noticed that i haven’t gone through are these three here which are on all three of the brushes and so they are shapes that you can put onto the map and then you can fill in with whatever texture you like so if for

Example i choose this one i could drag an area here on my map and then you can press apply and it will apply whatever you have selected with the opacity and stuff up here so if i put that to full and press apply again it makes a little circle there

Of the ground so that’s really good if you wanted a perfect circle or a perfect square or something like that and there’s a polygon one here as well so if you wanted something perfect that you wanted to apply a different texture to you can do that that way and you can

Also click here to change it to just fill the outline so if i apply that it does it like that but then if i do the interior it will do the interior as well so while you’re on the brush tool you’ll see on the right here that

There is this button here that will take you to the catalog which will show you all of the different textures that you have access to and on the left here you can tick to actually get access to all of the textures for the other types of maps

As well so they’re actually all in all quite a lot of textures that you can have but these first ones are the ones which are for the battle map mainly but to show you how it works i’m going to select this water one here make my size really big

Make sure i’m on the foreground and then i’m gonna fill all of this in with water because i’ve got the softness up you could see that the edges there weren’t very hard and sharp so now it’s here i might have decided actually this is a bit too blue a bit too

Vibrant so i could go to the catalog and i could choose another texture so let’s say this dirt texture here and i could put the opacity down so let’s put it down to about 40 and then i could go over the top of it and hopefully you can see that it’s

Making it a little bit more dirty looking i wanted to show you that although you have all of the textures here in the catalog you can actually put layers on top of each other to make sort of new different textures of your own so that is pretty much everything that i need to

Show you on the brush tool so let’s go on to the stamp tool as it’s called i always call this the asset tool though right so now we are on the sample let’s go through all of the bits around the edge so this here is the size like normal so

You can make the asset bigger and smaller here you’ve got the opacity which we’ve already gone through what that is here is the angle rotation so it doesn’t really work with a tree but if you wanted to rotate something you can do so here here are the layers

So you can have different layers of objects if you wanted to have the floor on the bottom layer for example and then you wanted a table and then you wanted something on the table you could use different layers for that this is the radius which we’ll

Go through in a second then density that we’ll go through on a second but on the right here you’ve got a catalog again so if i click into the catalog you will see all of these assets and once again like when we were looking at the brush tool

On the left here you could click down here to add the regional and world map assets to this list as well and also on the left you’ll see that these are all organized so if you wanted just the forest assets you could click forest there and it would just show you

Anything that is a forest asset something i really like about this tool is that it groups types of the same asset so you’ll see that it says here six and if i press show it will show you all the different types of that tree asset and then if i select an asset

That has multiple so let’s go for this full trees so you can see here has multiple if i click here on the left it will show on the right sorry get my left and right one on the right you’ll see all the different ones here so you could quickly select them

But there’s also this tick box that says random stamp that means when i click it will give me another random stamp of a random size and then you can click around and as you can see they’re all different and it makes quite a nice easy effect of something like a

Forest when you want all the trees to be slightly different and that leads me into the radius and density that i skipped over earlier you can set this to be quite large or small and you can now see that rather than having one asset i have a loads which are showing up here

And then i can change the dens density if i wanted less trees in the area but we’re just going to put it to the top to show you how it works and then just like a brush you can then brush over areas and now it has made a little woodland for me as

Easy as that and in addition to that you also have these down here which allow overlapping and randomized angle as well if you wanted to do that for your maps now we’re back in the stamp catalogue as they call it or all of the assets i just want to talk about what probably

The biggest weakness is of incarnate at the moment although they have said that this is something they’re going to be changing in the future if you see here these are the different kinds of walls that they have as assets and if we just pick this concrete wall for example

You’ll see it’s not like a brush you have to actually place the walls next to each other like so to create the wall a lot of other tools you’ll be able to actually click and drag and then create the wall as so but you can’t do that yet with

Incarnate although as i said that this is something that they’ll be changing in the future so maybe by the time you’ve seen this video that is already a feature but for the moment you have to create walls by clicking like that and then there’s a few different variations of walls so if

I wanted to add a circular bit here i could do by selecting it over here and then if i wanted to make put one here i would have to do like so and it’s just very fiddly to get it correct so it’s not great at the moment but as i

Said it is something they’re going to change in the future so if you can manage this for the moment hopefully it won’t take them too long to actually add a proper wall tool so back in the catalogue you can also see that they have got ones which are already created here

So you could just create a whole building by using these already made rooms if you wanted to bypass having to fiddle around with the walls so that’s better at least also in this stamp catalog you do have the search feature up here so if you didn’t want to have to scroll through

Or click through the left here you can actually search for what you’re looking for and i’ve used it quite a bit and it does actually work pretty well i’m also just very quickly going to scroll through the assets as i said this is the paid version that i’m using here

But i’ve been very impressed with the type of assets they’ve got like these phones here look pretty cool and if you keep scrolling down at some point oh yeah here they are so there’s a big titan’s hand and there’s this desert statue and there’s stuff like this that i

Generally haven’t seen in other tools so that’s pretty cool so there’s weapons that you can put in your wall there’s this big evil entrance as well that you can put down and then they have to walk through which is pretty cool looking so there’s quite a few good assets like that

And then right at the bottom you can see that there are shields and stuff like this which also adds a bit to your map if you wanted to put that like in the bottom corner make it look like an actual handout that you can give to them

And let’s pick one of these to show you the text tool now so let’s pick this one here so i’m gonna put this in the top right so you could have made your whole map put this one on top go to the text tool and then you can put your text there and

Then let’s just say that this map was called the brotherhood you could put in here the brotherhood and then on the right here you have all of the options you would expect with a text tool so you can change the font change the size so let’s get the size about right

Change the font you can see there’s a fair few fonts in here all of different styles of fantasy fonts i would call them i guess so let’s just put it like let’s use yeah let’s use that one why not you can also change the text color so

Let’s make it red just to show you how that works you can add a shadow as well which is quite nice in an outline like so it’s opacity as normal rotation curvature so you can add curves to it as well and then there’s spacing and then

There’s a blend mode here as well so there’s quite a few options and then you’ve got some of the same ones along the top here as well i do really like this because it adds a bit more to your maps and as i said before it makes it a bit more like a

Handout that you would actually give to your players which is quite cool sometimes to be able to send them something when they find a map in a building you can be like you find this map in the building and it looks like an actual handout i

Think that’s all i’m going to show you on the text it’s all pretty self-explanatory you type it here and then you make the changes you need to so i don’t think there’s much more to talk about in the text front so let’s go down to the grid

Tool which is here so you can show the grid here and then they’ve got the isometric grids the squares and the hexagons so if we pick the square grid just for example you can change the size so that’s good so that you can use this type of canvas but if you wanted it

To show more of a range then you can make the size smaller or if you wanted it to be really small you could make the size bigger you can also change the line width just here if you wanted it a little bit thicker you can make it really thick if you

Wanted to but i don’t think most people would want to do that but you could it’s quite thin at the beginning so you could make it a little bit thicker if you wanted it to be and then here you’ve got the grid color so you could change it if you wanted a

Red grid to fit in with the style if you had like a lava type of map you could make the grid color red which is quite cool addition as well and then they’ve got the opacity here as well so you can make it more visible or less visible with the opacity there’s also

Shadows that you can add to the quid here so there’s quite a lot of options really just for the grid lines if you really wanted to incorporate that into the map as well so i put this very quick map together with just some trees and a little build in there

Just to show you this last thing which will really make your map stand out in terms of looks so you will have noticed while i was scrolling through here that i’ve not been saying much about this one here which says color filter so on all of them it’s got a color filter

If we just go to one it’s got some presets here which if i click it changes the it sort of puts a instagram filter on top of it if i go through some here so you can see the differences it’s there’s quite a few really to go through and like there’s this

Parchment one here which if you wanted to give them a hand out a map that might be perfect for you but it really just by being able to put this filter on top it really does add to the look of the map and while you have one selected so we’ve

Got this clavity one here you can turn the intensity down as well so if that’s a little bit too colorful for you you could put it down just a smidge until you’re happy with it and you can just untick here if you just want to take it off all together

And then once you’ve made your map all you have to do is click save here so that you can save everything that you have done and then if you wanted to download it into a png to upload into your virtual tabletop you’re using or to

Print out or whatever you want to do you just press the export here and it’s as simple as that really there’s one more thing that i wanted to show you that i had a little play around and i’ve had somewhat success with it but i just want to show you how

It would look like if you wanted to make an isometric map using this tool as well so this what you’re looking at now is an isometric map that i made fully in incarnate so you can see that i’ve used the walls around here this is a little pool there’s the people

There’s the party here some gold just some cages and then some static mites or static tights always forget which round around it is and it looks okay it’s it’s i probably wouldn’t use isometric maps too much but if you did want to use an isometric map it it makes an a good enough

Isometric map i would say and this is without the filters on if i wanted to turn some of the filters on it does make it a little bit more vibrant and look a little bit better as well actually if you do want a full video where i show you how to make an

Isometric map on incarnate then do let me know and i can make that video for you there you have it hopefully you now know how the incarnate battle map creator works if this video did help you make sure to give it a like it really does help this channel and i’m really interested

To see what battle maps that you’ve created with incarnate so if you create any make sure to go over to twitter and post them on there and mention me i’m at that nerd strike and also make sure to subscribe i upload videos here on youtube every monday and thursday all about dnd

So if you want to continue discussions and to learn new things about dnd make sure to subscribe but until next time happy gaming you