I mean thats a big part of map making for a lot of people. It would be really cool if you could show an ai a crude map and have it make it look good though
This only helps babies making their first maps, it’s still better to draw your own maps if you actually have a setting to work on.
I can see the ai generators being okay for far corners of your world that you don’t plan on doing much with, but when I make my maps I have a pretty clear idea of where I want things.
This (and other anons who have said the same) reminds me of my freeform RP days, where I never ever had art of my characters, because I wanted to be free to describe my characters as I wished, and I didn't want to compromise my description to match pre-existing art. But a lot of players would find art first and then make a character, and in some sense that made them better roleplayers. I'm as autistic as I've ever been, but even now, I can see the appeal of just grabbing that funky-ass delta valley in
>btw i'm a geologist. >uno-reverse card
I don't need you to. But if you'd really like to see what a map designed by someone who has a grounding in geology and hydrology and how they impact a map, Eberron's Khorvaire is honestly more than I expected. The additional continents are...mixed bag, really.
Some are better than others
The point is that 1/1000 fantasy mapmakers make something that looks good or interesting and it takes hours, so for the scrubs without artistic talent this is better, faster, and easier
thing is though, looking good is only part of a map
Tolkien's map of middle earth doesn't look "that" good, it's fairly basic all things considered
and yet it's infinitely better than any of the AI generated fantasy maps, because all the features on the map mean something, they have purpose, they have history, they're part of a world
I'd rather have a scrub without artistic talent pour his heart into making a world map than an AI
But then of course you can start with a map and then fill it in and give all its point purpose and meaning.
I mean as a basic example, generating a random dungeon like pic has been possible for decades now. It's just a bunch of empty rooms, but any DM can go and fill it up and give the rooms and their contents context and purpose.
maybe but the problem is that you can't edit highly detailed maps like that
simple maps are easy to edit, like yours, if I want to, as zero artistic skill person, remove a dungeon room or add one or so, that's easy
but one of those superdetailed maps? If I say decide that I want an extra mountain? how the frick am I going to do that?
If I want to put something on a map that will be explained with "magic did it" it will not be a minor flaw in an AI model's mapping ability. It will be the giant frick off huge impact crater from Big Guy For You punching the world for being a b***h.
My map can have mountains and rivers almost wherever because none of my players ever give a shit and none are geologists.
Chances are your players are the same, and you just delude yourself into thinking it matters because deep down you want to be taken as seriously as you take making pretend places.
I'm pretty sure for D&D when epic level spells were a thing, you had a 10th level spell for Create Volcano. For lore reasons that's not possible anymore, but Wish might still be able to create a mountain.
Either way, you're looking at gods or top tier mages, especially if it's a whole mountain range.
>Randomly generated maps somehow obsoleteing purpose-made maps
... what?
Black person, if your map exists solely to be a picture, here is a clue: you don't need one.
If it's to represent specific piece of land - good fricking luck generating it from random assets.
And here is the final tip: A piece of paper and a pen(cil) can create whatever map you need in less than 30 seconds, ALWAYS to the exact specs
This looks like garbage. I'm all for AI shit but its maps are terrible. I have found that it's good at making bases for battle maps which you can go over in dungeondraft/inkarnate to map out properly.
Probably a better example. If you don't give a frick about the fine details being a mess you could probably throw this straight into a grid and play with it
I had an online game going for a while and I ran into this problem where my description of the room couldn't match with the map. I don't like using basic dungeon maps, but there's not enough assets to represent everything I want in a map. The ai's blurred details lets me have a nice map and still narratively describe it.
Here's what I want from map making and AI. I want it to be able to do all the hard work of figuring out tectonics, biomes, weather patterns, water currents, and wind currents. Either from scratch or from a picture I upload. But as far as I know there isn't a SINGLE company anywhere out there working on this.
The first one to do it and do it right gets my money. Right now there are random map generators that randomly put down biomes, but nothing that makes it accurate. Being able to generate multiple accurate planets would help speed up my scifi writing.
Azgaar sort of does that
it's not accurate but it's inaccurate on a level where you'd only notice if you're hardcore into worldbuilding yourself
it does a fine job of distributing biomes for the more casual viewer
>AI shills are just randomly jumping from board to board looking for ANYTHING relevant to said board that they can make a thread about and say "AI can do this now!" >comes to /tg/ but fails to understand that DMs need to control how the map looks, and actually enjoy custom designing our worlds by our own hands and thus have zero use for randomly generated nonsense
I pity AIgay, they genuinely do not seem to have souls. They can't for the life of them understand how or why some people can actually create things on their own, and enjoy doing it in the process, and don't just want a computer to do all of it for them.
I WOULD enjoy a lot if I could make a map I'm satisfied with, then have the AI pretty it up
I'd love for my mountain ranges to look like in those pictures, but only if they go exactly where I want them to go
Not really sure about the kneejerk tribalism from people like you. Pretty sure a lot of anons would be happy if this could be done reliably because it takes a ton of pressure off setting up games. I still make my own maps in dungeondraft, but damned if I'm not tempted at the idea. It's hard enough with the work-life balance to get my group together. Anything to take a bit of the pressure off would be nice.
It's probably healthier looking at it like the holodeck from Star Trek. I just want a nice, relaxing walk in the orc infested woods, computer, I don't want to micromanage the placement of every single tree. Is it lazy? Frick if I care. I've been a Forever GM since fricking high school, mate, I've done my bit in the trenches putting actual work into gaming. You know what wisdom I've learned? IT SUCKS. If I can outsource at least some of this shit I don't care if it's to a goddamn computer or Hadji from India.
That said it's clearly not quite there, yet. This scifi map
This looks like garbage. I'm all for AI shit but its maps are terrible. I have found that it's good at making bases for battle maps which you can go over in dungeondraft/inkarnate to map out properly.
is a mess, which is a damn shame because there are so few decent scifi asset packs for dungeondraft.
Its pretty close. It works for some battle maps. I made this one with a short two sentence description of a scene my players might end up in for a map I wouldnt want to make myself. And this is the second or third time I've messed with AI. To me this is perfectly serviceable.
Yeah bing. Prompt started like this "A gridless, top down rpg battle map set in..." then I described a scene with a forest and some fallen trees, plus 10 feet wide mushrooms along a dirt path. And I ended it with "Drawn as a watercolor"
Ehhh. Inkarnate map making is so easy and you can make them look quite good. Its also really fun. I wouldnt use AI to generate my world map, I like crafting it and having every area have meaning that I personally gave to it.
Now, generic battlemaps on the other hand, I can see the appeal for. The ability to type in roughly where the players are and what they see and have it generate a battle map is actually pretty enticing to me for a number of reasons.
1. Have a map no matter the situation or how crazy the players get
2. Can focus and minimize prep time to things that matter
3. I as a DM get to have some tactical fun with playing around what it generates
I definitely see a lot of potential in generative AI stuff, but worldmaps arent it IMO.
I don't usually spare much thought for the supernatural, or even for the possibility of the supernatural, but what if all these captive artificial minds are creating some kind of angry ghost energy that we can't detect yet?
Geography autism aside, you have no control over the actual output
Maybe AI maps are good for throwaway short-term shit but if you're making an actual setting where you want control over what specific feature you want on your map just use fricking Inkarnate or Azgaar's or even just MSPaint or something. I have 0 drawing skill and a combination of those 3 gets me decent enough maps
You called geography gore, then pretended it wasn't you, then called me a pseud. You are not doing anything to prove that you're not more pathetic than people who its a good idea to hack 5E to play other settings.
The knee jerk reaction against anything ai is hilarious.
You can doodle the basic outline of the world yourself, the continents,mountains,rivers etc and then have the ai use that as a base and make it look good.
You don't have to give all creative control away.
Eventually you will be able to do it in every photo editing software.
Currently you can probably do it with stable diffusion using txt2img and controlnet. I am not aware if there are specific models trained with maps for better accuracy though.
i generated a few myself and they are pretty good, except it makes rivers and mountains way too big for my taste. but it's good to get interesting shapes and biome layouts, so i just dl a generated map and redraw it myself as blank and fill in the rivers and mountains how i want them to be. before this what i used to do is draw a general shape with my eyes closed in order to get a sort of random-y interesting continent/island shape. this makes it more surprising which is good for my inspiration
What is this
Bing dall-e ai
yeah but you can't control and micromanage it
Correct, you have zero direct control.
I mean thats a big part of map making for a lot of people. It would be really cool if you could show an ai a crude map and have it make it look good though
You can do that with Stable Diffusion but I don’t know if there’s a good LORA for that ATM
NTA, but thanks anyway.
This only helps babies making their first maps, it’s still better to draw your own maps if you actually have a setting to work on.
I can see the ai generators being okay for far corners of your world that you don’t plan on doing much with, but when I make my maps I have a pretty clear idea of where I want things.
This (and other anons who have said the same) reminds me of my freeform RP days, where I never ever had art of my characters, because I wanted to be free to describe my characters as I wished, and I didn't want to compromise my description to match pre-existing art. But a lot of players would find art first and then make a character, and in some sense that made them better roleplayers. I'm as autistic as I've ever been, but even now, I can see the appeal of just grabbing that funky-ass delta valley in
and populating it with salty swamp-people.
Man, no. The entire point of mapping is for it to make sense. Currently AI models can't figure out why mountains exist. See your pic.
Mountains exist because I decided they exist, magic world with magic shit to explain all the other shit
pathetic
touche
You fool... You utter imbecile... You contemptible little funnyman... No one knows why mountains exist! Mountains aren't real! They're just big hills!
>Currently AI models can't figure out why mountains exist.
Neither can modern artists.
this
Please provide a fantasy map, and I will explain the geological inaccuracies present in it.
btw i'm a geologist.
There's some in the thread already. Do those.
>btw i'm a geologist.
>uno-reverse card
I don't need you to. But if you'd really like to see what a map designed by someone who has a grounding in geology and hydrology and how they impact a map, Eberron's Khorvaire is honestly more than I expected. The additional continents are...mixed bag, really.
>Please provide a fantasy map, and I will explain the geological inaccuracies present in it.
I'll give you three.
If you don't get ALL the inaccuracies you're not a geologist.
Teach me of your rock knowledge, oh wise one
Some are better than others
The point is that 1/1000 fantasy mapmakers make something that looks good or interesting and it takes hours, so for the scrubs without artistic talent this is better, faster, and easier
thing is though, looking good is only part of a map
Tolkien's map of middle earth doesn't look "that" good, it's fairly basic all things considered
and yet it's infinitely better than any of the AI generated fantasy maps, because all the features on the map mean something, they have purpose, they have history, they're part of a world
I'd rather have a scrub without artistic talent pour his heart into making a world map than an AI
But then of course you can start with a map and then fill it in and give all its point purpose and meaning.
I mean as a basic example, generating a random dungeon like pic has been possible for decades now. It's just a bunch of empty rooms, but any DM can go and fill it up and give the rooms and their contents context and purpose.
>Verification not required
See, /tg/ gets it.
maybe but the problem is that you can't edit highly detailed maps like that
simple maps are easy to edit, like yours, if I want to, as zero artistic skill person, remove a dungeon room or add one or so, that's easy
but one of those superdetailed maps? If I say decide that I want an extra mountain? how the frick am I going to do that?
> how the frick am I going to do that?
By telling the AI to add an extra mountain. Eventually. We’ll get there.
but not yet
once it gets to the point where you can exactly tell an AI what you want
for amateur mapmakers best would be to be able to draw a basic map, then have the AI pretty it up right now
AIs like Midjourney have inpainting, so you can highlight a specific area of the image and tell it to change what's drawn there.
It works great for maps, because you can generate a realistic looking base map and then use inpainting to add or remove features.
Hey the gods didnt really know what they were doing when they made it
If I want to put something on a map that will be explained with "magic did it" it will not be a minor flaw in an AI model's mapping ability. It will be the giant frick off huge impact crater from Big Guy For You punching the world for being a b***h.
basically this
your map largely has to make sense, so the magical elements obviously stand out
My map can have mountains and rivers almost wherever because none of my players ever give a shit and none are geologists.
Chances are your players are the same, and you just delude yourself into thinking it matters because deep down you want to be taken as seriously as you take making pretend places.
>and none are geologists.
Geologists don't give a shit about fantasy maps too.
There are dozens of us.
I play with a lot of nerds that would notice something was obviously wrong
so it works for my group at least
>Currently AI models can't figure out why mountains exist.
The labor of ancient earth elementals?
I don't know why you think these are good counter arguments. Most professional artists don't understand basic geology nowadays.
Most people can't read either, assuming we take you as the exemplar.
what level spell caster do you need to be in order to raise mountains or create whole mountain ranges.
depends on the setting
that said in most ttrpg settings raising entire mountains is purely the domain of the gods
I'm pretty sure for D&D when epic level spells were a thing, you had a 10th level spell for Create Volcano. For lore reasons that's not possible anymore, but Wish might still be able to create a mountain.
Either way, you're looking at gods or top tier mages, especially if it's a whole mountain range.
No one cares about your geography autism
Mountains exist to be tall places to clomb to.
>Randomly generated maps somehow obsoleteing purpose-made maps
... what?
Black person, if your map exists solely to be a picture, here is a clue: you don't need one.
If it's to represent specific piece of land - good fricking luck generating it from random assets.
And here is the final tip:
A piece of paper and a pen(cil) can create whatever map you need in less than 30 seconds, ALWAYS to the exact specs
>rivers bisecting landmasses
cringe
its more realistic than mountain range wienerblockery.
And other things AI-gays tell themselves to cope about having 0 creativity
If you don't enjoy worldbuilding there are plenty of published settings you can use, why not just do that instead?
This looks like garbage. I'm all for AI shit but its maps are terrible. I have found that it's good at making bases for battle maps which you can go over in dungeondraft/inkarnate to map out properly.
Probably a better example. If you don't give a frick about the fine details being a mess you could probably throw this straight into a grid and play with it
I had an online game going for a while and I ran into this problem where my description of the room couldn't match with the map. I don't like using basic dungeon maps, but there's not enough assets to represent everything I want in a map. The ai's blurred details lets me have a nice map and still narratively describe it.
Here's what I want from map making and AI. I want it to be able to do all the hard work of figuring out tectonics, biomes, weather patterns, water currents, and wind currents. Either from scratch or from a picture I upload. But as far as I know there isn't a SINGLE company anywhere out there working on this.
The first one to do it and do it right gets my money. Right now there are random map generators that randomly put down biomes, but nothing that makes it accurate. Being able to generate multiple accurate planets would help speed up my scifi writing.
this, AI is doing minimal work for maximum profitability when they should be taking the difficult and boring parts of mapmaking and automating it.
Azgaar sort of does that
it's not accurate but it's inaccurate on a level where you'd only notice if you're hardcore into worldbuilding yourself
it does a fine job of distributing biomes for the more casual viewer
Yeah, I want something a little better. But out of the options its the best out there.
Inkarnate is ass but this doesn't even serve the same function.
>AI shills are just randomly jumping from board to board looking for ANYTHING relevant to said board that they can make a thread about and say "AI can do this now!"
>comes to /tg/ but fails to understand that DMs need to control how the map looks, and actually enjoy custom designing our worlds by our own hands and thus have zero use for randomly generated nonsense
I pity AIgay, they genuinely do not seem to have souls. They can't for the life of them understand how or why some people can actually create things on their own, and enjoy doing it in the process, and don't just want a computer to do all of it for them.
I WOULD enjoy a lot if I could make a map I'm satisfied with, then have the AI pretty it up
I'd love for my mountain ranges to look like in those pictures, but only if they go exactly where I want them to go
Not really sure about the kneejerk tribalism from people like you. Pretty sure a lot of anons would be happy if this could be done reliably because it takes a ton of pressure off setting up games. I still make my own maps in dungeondraft, but damned if I'm not tempted at the idea. It's hard enough with the work-life balance to get my group together. Anything to take a bit of the pressure off would be nice.
It's probably healthier looking at it like the holodeck from Star Trek. I just want a nice, relaxing walk in the orc infested woods, computer, I don't want to micromanage the placement of every single tree. Is it lazy? Frick if I care. I've been a Forever GM since fricking high school, mate, I've done my bit in the trenches putting actual work into gaming. You know what wisdom I've learned? IT SUCKS. If I can outsource at least some of this shit I don't care if it's to a goddamn computer or Hadji from India.
That said it's clearly not quite there, yet. This scifi map
is a mess, which is a damn shame because there are so few decent scifi asset packs for dungeondraft.
Its pretty close. It works for some battle maps. I made this one with a short two sentence description of a scene my players might end up in for a map I wouldnt want to make myself. And this is the second or third time I've messed with AI. To me this is perfectly serviceable.
You use the bing one?
Yeah bing. Prompt started like this "A gridless, top down rpg battle map set in..." then I described a scene with a forest and some fallen trees, plus 10 feet wide mushrooms along a dirt path. And I ended it with "Drawn as a watercolor"
Interesting. I'll have to check it out, anon. Thanks for the info!
Ehhh. Inkarnate map making is so easy and you can make them look quite good. Its also really fun. I wouldnt use AI to generate my world map, I like crafting it and having every area have meaning that I personally gave to it.
Now, generic battlemaps on the other hand, I can see the appeal for. The ability to type in roughly where the players are and what they see and have it generate a battle map is actually pretty enticing to me for a number of reasons.
1. Have a map no matter the situation or how crazy the players get
2. Can focus and minimize prep time to things that matter
3. I as a DM get to have some tactical fun with playing around what it generates
I definitely see a lot of potential in generative AI stuff, but worldmaps arent it IMO.
I always jut used Paint.
I don't usually spare much thought for the supernatural, or even for the possibility of the supernatural, but what if all these captive artificial minds are creating some kind of angry ghost energy that we can't detect yet?
Then you take it to /x/. No, seriously, they have threads for whether the internet is alive, dead, whether AI are actually God, demons, aliens.
Geography autism aside, you have no control over the actual output
Maybe AI maps are good for throwaway short-term shit but if you're making an actual setting where you want control over what specific feature you want on your map just use fricking Inkarnate or Azgaar's or even just MSPaint or something. I have 0 drawing skill and a combination of those 3 gets me decent enough maps
What sort of geography gore is this? It looks interesting but the physics would be nothing like our own world.
>Fantasy setting
>Expecting realistic geographic morphology
Stop it. You're worse than D&Drones.
Anon did not expect it to be realistic, anon remarked that it was un-earth-like. You're a pseud.
You called geography gore, then pretended it wasn't you, then called me a pseud. You are not doing anything to prove that you're not more pathetic than people who its a good idea to hack 5E to play other settings.
>You called geography gore
Clearly one of those creation myths where the gods forged the world from the corpse(s) of giant(s).
looks like a fricked up version of albion from fable
I said teach me, bastard!
I'm not a geologist but I think it was something like this.
>anons become so creatively bankrupt he needs a computer to imagine a map for him
SAD!
The knee jerk reaction against anything ai is hilarious.
You can doodle the basic outline of the world yourself, the continents,mountains,rivers etc and then have the ai use that as a base and make it look good.
You don't have to give all creative control away.
What AI programs work best for doing this, please?
Eventually you will be able to do it in every photo editing software.
Currently you can probably do it with stable diffusion using txt2img and controlnet. I am not aware if there are specific models trained with maps for better accuracy though.
i generated a few myself and they are pretty good, except it makes rivers and mountains way too big for my taste. but it's good to get interesting shapes and biome layouts, so i just dl a generated map and redraw it myself as blank and fill in the rivers and mountains how i want them to be. before this what i used to do is draw a general shape with my eyes closed in order to get a sort of random-y interesting continent/island shape. this makes it more surprising which is good for my inspiration
SHot in the dark but anyone happen to see a tabletop map with a skeleton with a cat on its lap sitting in a chair?
You can’t really read the text on this. Annoying.