I recently started working on a campaign for Full Thrust and needed a map. Space based hex grid was preferred. I started hunting for one and came across an app for generating hex grids. mkhexgrid is pretty flexible. You can output the map in several different file formats, control the number of hexs, the colour, weight and opacity of the lines and you can add user defined coordinates to each hex (or each x hexes). There are more settings and options that I've not explored yet also. I selected an SVG for the file format. This would produce a file that I was able to easily edit and would produce a grid that was not "on" the background. It would also scale nicely if I needed it to. I was wanting a starscape as the background so hit Google Images, set the image size to Huge and started browsing. I found a very nice wide-field view of The Summer Triangle. With this project I also wanted planets to graphically represent star systems. The same approach as above was used (with much smaller images). The graphics packages that I used for this was Inkscape and the Using the GIMP I edited the planets to start with. Basically selected everything black, inverted the selection so the planer was selected, floated that and turned it into a new layer, hid the background layer and saved the visible image as a png. This gave me nice images with a transparent background that would work fine on the star field I had. I also loaded the star field, rotated and scaled to a 300dpi image on A4. Now these were ready I loaded the generated hex grid into Inkscape, added 3 layers (grid, planets & stars). I cut the grid off the background layer and pasted it on the grid (topmost) layer. Selecting the Stars (lowest) layer I added an image object, scaled slightly and positioned so it filled the page. Finally, selecting the planets layer I added all of my planet images, selected them all and copy/paste/paste to triple the number of images in that layer. Then it was just a matter of dragging them around a bit to create the map. The SVG image was saved for later editing if needed (and it was) and exported as a png for the web. These are the samples of what I generated with varying colours and opacity for the coordinates and grid.
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