The tricky part is to find the right value for “Tile Height” to get the tile size that matches the scale of your map.

Click “OK” in the Mosaic dialog to apply the grid to the player.Īnd that is the entire process.

(You can’t disable the reflection, but this makes it completely transparent and therefore invisible.)

Set the value for “A” to “0” or move the slider all the way to the left. Light Color: To remove shiny reflections on each hex, click on the color to open the “Light Color” dialog.Joints Color: This will be the color of your grid lines.Set Tile Spacing to 1 (or higher, if you want wider grid lines).Set Tile Color Variation to 0 (to make all tiles blank).Set Tile Neatness to 1 (to make orderly hexes).Set Tile Height to 1 (to remove reflection effect).Set Tile Size to your preferred size of tiles.Make sure Tile Geometry is set to “Hexagons”.Open the Mosaic dialog: Filters > Distortions > Mosaic.Make sure the new layer is above the layer with the map. Add a new layer: Layer > New Layer > Press “Okay”.But at least for GIMP I found a great solution to add a grid on top of any image. Make a best guess which terrain on the background image dominates, and when you don’t stay consistent between different occasions the players are passing through it nobody will notice.įinding an image of a hex grid on a transparent background to simply slap on top of a map you have in Photoshop or GIMP has been a huge pain in the butt for most of this afternoon.

The terrain type of each hex won’t always be completely clear, but that’s not really an actual issue. You can also overlay a hex grid on top of the GM version of the map along with the hidden sites and other notes.

In most situations you want to have separate maps for the players and the GM anyway, so you can keep track of where hidden and unknown sites are located without giving it away to the players. As a setting creator, I see even myself getting affected by that and it significantly hampers my work on the world.īut hexes are very useful as tools to keep track of the party’s position as it is moving through the wilderness. I feel it creates too much abstraction in the minds of players that works against them mentally visualizing the setting of the game as an actual world. However, I am not a fan of these maps, at least not as something to put into the hands of the players. I used one of them to make this map of the Savage Frontier five years back. There are a number of programms out there that allow you to make a hex map out of hex tiles.

Google maps grid overlay