WIP - Looking for commentary

[Wrose]

Hello everyone,
I posted a couple days ago about trying to pull an image into Cartographer to work on. I tried using Cartographer for this world map but ultimately gave up and went back to my old medium, Photoshop.
The top half has a great deal of regions/cities/landmarks marked out as that's where the campaign will be focused in on. I really don't have many ideas for the lower half yet.
What do you guys think? Please be honest.
Tel'Lagaia - Doraen Continent
WRose

[NeonKnight]

Hey!

I am a bigtime CC3 user, and I just saw that you are having problem putting a map image into CC3.

To help you and others, here is a quick & dirty 'tutorial'

First, make sure your map that you are trying to put into CC3 is in BMP format. While CC3 will save a map in BMP or JPG, it will only accept images in the BMP format or PNG format. For working maps, I prefer the BMP Format.

SO, once you have your map or image saved as a BMP, getting it into the program is easy, but first, there is that tricky thing about scale. It would be sweet to ensure that the scale of you image will match CC3 so you can calcualte areas, distances, etc. For that, you need to look at your image of map and calculate the scale. For your map, I calculated the distances as approximately 1280 miles East/west by 1690 Miles North/South based on your Scale Bar.

In CC3, I make a layer and a Sheet I call BMP (Name doesn;t matter, just something that makes sens to you. I Put the BMP sheet near the bottom. This allows me to ensure the BMP is on it's own ayer, and makes it easier to delete from the map at a later stage.

Then go to DRAW menu, and select Insert File. Naviaget to where your BMP map is stored, and select it. If the warning image appears, select the bottom option. CC3 will then ask where you want you first corner. Enter with the keyboard 0,0. On an X/Y grid this means 0 miles East, and 0 miles north. Hit enter, and then enter (for this particualr map) 1280,1690 or 1280 Miles east, 1680 Miles North. And then hit enter.

Viola, you Map is now in CC3, and you can trace on it, and everything else.

I hope you found this little tutorial useful, and if people want, I can write up a better tut with better images.

[Jharviss]

There's a couple things I notice right off the bat --

Around Ter'min (Region) the landscape looks a bit put-together. There's a line there that's a bit jarring.

The second is simply that the Northern Coast doesn't look natural. It looks too straight-edged at some areas, especially at the point above the coast. Maybe that's just me though.

Otherwise, this is really well done. I very much like this work and wish I had some inkling as to how to do similar cartography. Bravo!

[RobA]

The only odd thing to my eye is the Vesteev(?) River in the south. It is so wide (20 miles or so, by the scale) that it is more of a bay all the way up to where it narrows (WNW of the fallen Caverns). Broad rivers usually imply flat terrain, which usually meanders. This looks more like a fault line.

-Rob (Rivers on his Brain) A>

[jaerdaph]

SO, once you have your map or image saved as a BMP, getting it into the program is easy, but first, there is that tricky thing about scale. It would be sweet to ensure that the scale of you image will match CC3 so you can calcualte areas, distances, etc. For that, you need to look at your image of map and calculate the scale. For your map, I calculated the distances as approximately 1280 miles East/west by 1690 Miles North/South based on your Scale Bar.

In CC3, I make a layer and a Sheet I call BMP (Name doesn;t matter, just something that makes sens to you. I Put the BMP sheet near the bottom. This allows me to ensure the BMP is on it's own ayer, and makes it easier to delete from the map at a later stage.

Then go to DRAW menu, and select Insert File. Naviaget to where your BMP map is stored, and select it. If the warning image appears, select the bottom option. CC3 will then ask where you want you first corner. Enter with the keyboard 0,0. On an X/Y grid this means 0 miles East, and 0 miles north. Hit enter, and then enter (for this particualr map) 1280,1690 or 1280 Miles east, 1680 Miles North. And then hit enter.

This method works very well for a good estimate of scale to get your image into CC3, but here's something you can do for greater precision once the image is imported. If you know the distance between two fixed points in your map (which you do because you included a scale bar), you can use the Distance command to see what distance CC3 thinks is between those two points, then use the Scale command to resize the image to match up with CC3. I imported a BMP of your JPG into CC3 as described above and saw that 50 miles on the image is equivalent to 51.39850 in CC3 measuring units (so NeonKnight estimated your map size very well!). To do this I went to the Info menu and selected Distance, then measured the 50 mile bar on the map scale from one end to the other. Next, I *right* clicked on the Scale button on the left side and chose Non-visual Scale. The command line at the bottom asks you to select an entity so select the image, right click and select Do It, the command line asks you to scale by a factor so type in 50/51.39850 (CC3 will even do the math for you so you don't need to divide 50 by 51.39850 yourself), hit enter, the comand line will ask for a scale center so type in 0,0 and then hit enter. YOu will see the image appear to shrink abit and now your image will be much closer in size to your original JPG drawing. You can see how close by doing the distance command again on the scale bar. CC3 is built on the FastCAD engine, so there are a lot of precision tools you can use "under the hood".

Hope this is helpful.

[Wrose]

Neonknight and Jaerdaph, Thanks much for the CC3 Tutorial and tips. My biggest problem when I was trying to use the CC3 wasn't importing the graphic but combining what was existing with symbols in the program. I couldn't get the mountains to look right on the existing terrain for example. I didn't try tracing over the imported image though. NeonKnight, if it's not too much trouble, do you think you could please put together a quick tutorial on how I would go about integrating the image and CC3 components? My main reason for thinking about utilizing CC3 was to emphasize some of the mountains on the eastern coast.

Jharviss and RobA, I went and altered the stuff you guys pointed out. Does this look better?
Tel'Lagaia Continent Post Edit

WRose

[NeonKnight]

Glad it was of some help, and I will see what I can do.

[Ishmayl]

I think the map is turning out very well, Wrose, my one and only concern upon viewing it now is that the Ke'Londa Peaks are hard to distinguish as mountains. Using context clues (such as the name! and the white and gray colors), it's relatively obvious, but with no labels, it may just appear to be a blob in the center of the map, or even a crater, instead of mountains. Of course, I have no true advice to give in regards to methods you could use to bring out the mountains more. If you had some way to make them look a bit more 3-Dish, or maybe expanded them a bit on the X or Y plane to make them less of a circle, and more of a range. However, that would change your map, and that's probably not something you're interested in! Other than that, very neat map, I love when people take earth maps and arrange them accordingly to fit a campaign or world.

[Wrose]

Ishmayl, I'll see what I can do. I think what may have happened is that I tried too hard to blend the edges into the remaining terrain, that ended up giving it a flattened out look. Thanks for the commentary, I'll be careful of stuff like that in the future.
WRose