CC3 Continental Map: The Northlands

[jaerdaph]

Thanks for the pointer about right clicking on Change Properties. That's been quite useful!

Awesome - right clicking on a lot of the buttons in CC3 opens up whole new possibilities.

I still have not discovered a way to get rid of that beveled edge on the landmass. It's not bugging me so much now, but I know when I make the political version of this map it will.

Are you using the default sheet effects from the map template or are these effects you added? What you can do (either way) is left click the Sheets and Effects button, check Activate Sheets, select the sheet with the bevel effect on it on the left side of the box, uncheck the effect on the bottom right side of the box that you don't want to see on your political map, then hit OK. That lets you turn off individual effects on a sheet without turning off all effects on that sheet or all effects on all sheets in the drawing. Of course if you don't want it at all you can just delete the effect from the list. It only will get deleted in the current map and not on any other maps you might want to create later.

Also, is there a way to cut a hole out of the center of an object? I liked your suggestion of cutting the rivers and lakes out of the landmass to let the ocean show through, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without pulling points from the coast.

There is a (somewhat involved) technique called multipoly to cut a hole in something, but thinking about it more, you really don't need to do that. If you have a lake that doesn't connect to a river or the ocean, just draw it as you did before. If you have a lake with river that doesn't touch the ocean, again draw it the same way as a single poly with the river protruding out. Rivers and lakes that eventually go to the sea would be part of the landmass outline with the river jutting into the interior of the poly up and around and back down to the outer coast again.

One further question: is there a way to save a view of the map with a different zoom level? When I start doing detail work, it would be nice to be able to show just the areas I am working on rather than the entire map.

There are a series of Zoom/View navigation buttons in the upper right corner of CC3. You can zoom in, out, zoom extents, go back to your last view etc. They work independently of other commands, so you can actually be in the middle of a drawing command, select one of those to zoom where you want, then go back to the drawing to finish the command you were working on. Play around with them on your map or an example map (you can't really hurt anything with them) because it is the best way to learn. The buttons look like magnifying glasses.

[Midgardsormr]

The zoom controls are no problem. I was just wondering if I could output a jpg of a zoomed-in area. I suppose I could use Print Screen, but I'd feel compelled to take it into PhotoPaint to crop out the interface.

Concerning that bevel: I am using the default effects, plus a dark glow on the coastline. Per your advice, I started turning things off to see their what they were doing; the bevel was caused by the Spatial Matrix Processing. A little obnoxious to have something like that on by default, but I can deal. Is there a tutorial anywhere that details how to use that effect? The help file is a little obtuse in that area.

Next step is to lay in the roads and cities. Roads are easy, but for the cities I'm going to try to define some of my own symbols, just so I can muck around in a new part of the software. I'm starting to get the hang of things, I think.

[NeonKnight]

I love the map, but.....(it's not a huge But, I'm currently sitting on it ), I try to steer clear of the Fill Styles. The are nice for quick and drity, but if you look on your map, and it is a beautiful map, the fill style gets 'cut off', so you have mountians at the top of the fill style with no peaks.

The other think is, Fill Styles have definite descernable pattern to them, something when I make my own maps I am able to keep clear of by changing up the symbols, their positions etc.

Other than this one, small critique, I likey very, very much!

[jaerdaph]

The zoom controls are no problem. I was just wondering if I could output a jpg of a zoomed-in area. I suppose I could use Print Screen, but I'd feel compelled to take it into PhotoPaint to crop out the interface.

Ah, gotcha. Here's what I do to get PNGs, JPGs or BMPs out of CC3, be it the full map or just sections of it. At the command prompt, type this command: wbs. wbs will ask you for a first corner (click on it in the map or type in a coordinate), then it will ask you for the opposite corner, (again click on it or type in a coordinate), and then a Save Bitmap Section box will pop up. Select the file type you want to save as (PNG, BMP or JPG), give the file a name and click save. If you have Snap on, that will work with wbs if you want a little more percision control when selecting the corners. If you need to change the output settings of the JPG/BMP/PNG file, go to the Tools menu, Options... and click on the BMP, JPEG, PNG button and you can do it from there.

Concerning that bevel: I am using the default effects, plus a dark glow on the coastline. Per your advice, I started turning things off to see their what they were doing; the bevel was caused by the Spatial Matrix Processing. A little obnoxious to have something like that on by default, but I can deal. Is there a tutorial anywhere that details how to use that effect? The help file is a little obtuse in that area.

Yeah, a lot of the templates and template wizards have default settings for the sheet effects that assume you are just using the standard symbol set/style/drawing tools in CC3. Since you are effectively creating your own style, the settings might not be right for that. I'd love to see Profantasy add an option to add or not add pre-set sheet effects in templates you create with the wizards. There isn't really a lot of help available yet for the different sheet effects yet. What I do know I've learned from the CC user mailing list and from experimentation, trial and error. I have to admit that Spatial Matrix Processing is a bit of a mystery to me.

Next step is to lay in the roads and cities. Roads are easy, but for the cities I'm going to try to define some of my own symbols, just so I can muck around in a new part of the software. I'm starting to get the hang of things, I think.

That's very good! It gets to be very addictive after awhile, especially when you are learning new things the software can do and master things.

I also want to suggest that you try placing symbols for the forests and mountains rather than relying on the fills to do so. While it is a little more time consuming, I think you might be happier with the results.

[Midgardsormr]

You guys weren't kidding about the improvement I'd make by hand-placing symbols! I haven't revised the forests yet, but I did the mountains, and the difference is enormous.

The map now has a few cities and roads. There are more than these in the game world, of course, but I am restricting the information on the map to what I've actually got in my notes so that I can keep things flexible as I build the campaign.

The labels were made with the font Dauphin. I need to do some work sizing and placing them still, and I need to find a way to display a very large "Imperial Vendria" across the top portion of the map. My attempts at that label so far just have not looked good.

I gave up on defining my own symbols for the cities for the moment. It wasn't going the way I wanted it to, so I thought I'd put that off for a while. The dots work just fine for now, and my time is better spent on other things at the moment.

I would also like to replace the neatline. Any suggestions? I've got one idea, but it's a bit too florid for this map--I'm going to save it for the city map I've got planned.

[NeonKnight]

The fill styles work good for 'bulk', well, filling, of large areas, and you can kind of campflague it with other hand placed fill symbols.

Also, don't outline your fill styles for less impact.

[jaerdaph]

Your map is looking very good. I like the font you are using, and using the circles for cities is something I've always liked on overland fantasy maps (and the black triangle as well).

I must admit I had to look up what a neatline was to learn it was another word for map border. This is why I love this list - I learn something new about cartography everyday! Right now I can't think of any suggestions for that - perhaps some sort of wood or stone tiled fill and use a bevel sheet effect on it? Perhaps when the map is closer to completion inspiration will strike us.

[Midgardsormr]

I had a nice block of time to work on the map today, and naturally I ran into a brick wall.

I'm really interested in doing something different with the forests. Hand-placing mountain symbols did wonders, but doing the same for the forests is not looking good to me. Part of the problem is I just don't much like the look of the line art symbols. I've been looking through some of my novels for inspiration, and the forests that look best to me are the ones that look like a sort of solid, tufted shape, perhaps with some texturing. Of course, an awful lot of maps seem to omit the forests entirely, which suggests that it's a somewhat widespread difficulty.

Any suggestions on how to make a nice looking forest in that same line art style?

[ravells]

Could you scan one of the pictures from the novel? That would give us a much better idea as to what you're after.

[jaerdaph]

Any suggestions on how to make a nice looking forest in that same line art style?

Do you mean something similar to these maps?:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/wd...rLarge_150.jpg

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/users...p_flat_sml.gif

http://www.gamerdad.com/images/RPG_a...es.CC3_Map.jpg

If anyone has techniques for creating something similar to those forests in CC3, I'd be interested as well.