This time I tackle the issue of getting your lines to look the same when you export your map as they look inside CC3+. Why can grid lines sometimes almost disappear in the export? Why is the pattern of dashed lines so different?

All these issues relate to how you scale different things in CC3+. Sometimes the default options are fine, but sometimes they are not what you need for the current map. The intention with this article is to make you aware of these issues, and therefore being better able to both know what to do, but also to make more informed decisions in the first place.

This is tackled in the first Command Spotlight issue, found in the ProFantasy Community Forum.

Anders Bergström – known as Lillhans on the ProFantasy forum – has astounded us at ProFantasy and the whole CC3+ community with his aquarelle-style drawings for a while now, with many of us having trouble believing that they were done in CC3+. Look at this map:

It’s so different from the usual battlemap styles (varied as they are), that everybody was wondering “how did he do it?”.

After creating an Annual style based on his work in September 2019, he’s now spilling even more secrets in the following article “Doodles & Drawings”. Let’s hand over to him:

Doodles & Drawings

A while back, it was suggested that I write an article about the train of thought and process of using Campaign Cartographer in what has to be among the least time-efficient ways possible. That is, using it to the best of my abilities. Not too long after, there was also a request for a tutorial being made and while a completely different script was already in the making for the first article, I figured I might as well splice thoughts and ideas. Then, a third request for popping the hood of my faux hand-drawn endeavours prompted yet another consideration of focus and approach and – would you believe it – a third iteration seemed more appropriate after all.

Anyway, here is the rather lengthy introduction. Don’t worry: there will also be some kind-of-technical stuff further down the line. And that stuff is going to be rather lengthy as well, I guess.

Continue reading the pdf article…

About the author: Occasional map-finisher, sometimes character sheet filler, and at least once every two decades talking with the others about putting the band back together. It’s probably for the best not to mention I one time was in the jury (when they still had those) for the Eurovision song contest national selections.

In CC3+, each template is designed for a single style, which comes with it’s own symbols, fills and tools, while the resources belonging to other styles are not directly visible in the GUI.

This is intended behavior, because it puts the chosen style in focus. You know that all the elements you are being offered are designed to work with that style and fit with the visual design of the style. This behavior is both a blessing and a curse. Keeping the focus on the style is good. If you own everything, you’ll have about 40.000 different raster symbols (and a lot of vector symbols too, but I don’t have the count), you really don’t want to filter through all of these all the time when working on your map to find the ones matching your current map style, that’s just hugely impractical. But every now and then you want to be able to mix map styles, and you know of a couple of styles that work very well together. How can you easily access all the symbols from these styles?

Continue reading »

Dear fellow map-makers!

Summer is getting closer here in the northern hemisphere and we are all looking forward to easing out of the lockdowns. We hope you’re staying safe and healthy and still get some quality map-making time! We certainly have a lot of useful articles and resources for you to help with that.

News

• • The June Annual issue – “The Crossroads Inn”, a map pack by Christina Trani – has been released

Resources

• • The archived live mapping video of the last few weeks are available on YouTube.
  • Marvel at the selection of beautiful Maps of the Month created by our users in May.
  • Christian Trani has started a new series titled “All the Annuals“, where she creates a map for each of the Annual issues, starting with the Annual 2019. Check out the maps for January, February, and March of that year.

Articles

• Ari Gilder continues his series on city building with a look at the random street tool in City Designer 3.
• Sue Daniel explains the methods she used in her Orde-on-the-rock city map to achieve the amazing rock elevations.
• Sue also continues her article series on shore and ocean effects with part 3 (Compass roses and rhumb lines) and part 4 (Beaches and Drop Shadows).
• Remy Monsen provides a great way to make Perspectives walls into ruins of themselves.

Welcome to the third part in the Shore and Ocean Effects for Overland Maps series.

In this part we well be focussing on adding rhumb lines to beautify a relatively smooth ocean texture.

Arumnia, the example map used in this tutorial, was drawn in the John Roberts overland style, which was recently included with the core CC3 app as part of Update 25.  If your software is up to date you do not need to own any of the annuals or add-ons to make use of the FCW file included in this blog. Continue reading »

Dear cartographer’s, we hope you are all still safe and healthy and being able to carefully ease out of the lockdown measures all across the world. We’ve had a lot of articles on the blog last month, check below whether you have missed any of them!

News

• The May Annual issue – “Ryecroft Town”, a city style by Glynn Seal- has been released

Resources

• The archived live mapping video of the last couple weeks are available on YouTube.
• See the selection of Maps of the Month created by our users in April.

Articles

• Sue Daniel started a new series of articles on varying and improving coastlines in CC3+.
• Ari Gilder continues his series on city building with a look at symbol and catalogs in City Designer 3.
• Sue’s second article on shore and ocean effects discusses ocean contours.
• Ari Gilder draws inspiration from real-world cities in his city building series.

Welcome to the March newsletter, dear cartographers! We hope you stay healthy (and at home if possible) in these times of pandemic. You could use the time to create some beautiful maps, for example in preparation for your games when all the current restrictions are lifted again, or for online games if you already do these or want to try them out. See our article by Remy Monsen on the topic below.

News

• The March Annual issue is available for download. Check out the Alexandria-class starship and it’s accompanying tutorial on bitmap fills.
• We have released Update 25 for CC3+, adding more city and dungeon capabilities to the base CC3+.
• Until further notice, we have halved the price of Campaign Cartographer 3+ to make it more accessible during the current outbreak.

Resources

• Remy Monsen explains how to prepare and export battle maps from Dungeon Designer 3 for virtual tabletops and then import them into MapTool, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds or d20Pro.
• Check out a sampling of user maps shared by the Profantasy community in February.

Articles

• Ari Gilder posted part 2 of hie article on city building and mapping with City Deisgner 3.
• The German online magazine “Teilzeithelden” (Part-time Heroes) has published a review of Campaign Cartographer 3+ (in German).

Virtual tabletops (VTTs) are a great way of playing role-playing games together when you can’t meet physically. They make it easier to play with people from all over the world, and are a nice substitute when it becomes impossible to bring the old gang together in the same location any more.

One of the main attractions for these programs when compared to general-purpose meeting/teleconference software is their focus on displaying maps to the the players, enabling you to fight your miniature battles digitally. And maps are always an important aspect in most role playing games. I myself actually use VTT software to display the battle maps, even if my group always meet physically at my place and roll physical dice, because I can more easily do things like display the map on a projector, and only display what the players see (automatic fog-of-war/lighting/sight ranges).

So, today we will look at how to take those dungeon maps you’ve lovingly crafted in DD3 and make them available for use in the a VTT environment. Now, there are lots of different VTT software to choose from out there, and I can’t really cover them all, but I’ve tried to cover some of the more popular ones, such as MapTool, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20 and D20Pro. And many things, especially all the various concerns when exporting the map from DD3 will be the same for most software solutions, so this article should help you out no matter the system.

Continue reading »

This is part 3 of the “Creating a New Map Style” series of articles.

It’s been far too long since the last part of this article, so let’s hurry up and take on the next step in creating a custom style for CC3+. After setting up the template and adding new bitmap fills, we now need to look at the new symbols.

1. Setting up new catalogs

The first step is to set up one or more new catalogs to hold the symbols. For this example, I’ll take the Worlds of Wonder style’s catalogs and create a copy under a new folder /Symbols/Maps/Worlds of Wonder BW/. I rename them to remove the CA145 (the Annual issue number).

I won’t go through the details of drawing or importing new symbols here, and for the example, I’ll just edit the existing Worlds Wonder symbols to be grayscale instead of coloured versions of themselves.

When that’s done let’s make sure the map loads one of these catalogs when it opens. Go to File > Drawing properties and open the map note “OnNewMap”. Basically this is a macro that gets executed when someone creates a new map from the wizard template. Change the line
“CATALOG @Symbols/Maps/Annual Worlds of Wonder/CA145 All.FSC”
to
“CATALOG @Symbols/Maps/Annual Worlds of Wonder BW/Mountains.FSC”
and do the same in the OnOpenMacro map note. This macro defines what happens if someone just opens a map based on the style.

2. Creating Catalog Settings

One of the more obscure things to do when creating a new drawing style is to set up the catalog settings so the catalog buttons open the correct symbol catalogs for the style. To do so, click the All Drawing Tools button on the catalog toolbar and then the “Advanced” button on the dialog. The dialog should then look the one on the left here. It lists all the available catalog settings that match both the master filter and the setting filter. We will need to create a new master filter and the settings to match.

Deciding on a master filter, I will make it “WBW” (for Worlds of Wonder Black/White). I select each of the setting entries I want to duplicate in turn and create a new one based on the current one, where I replace the “CA145” with “WBW”. These will not appear in the list for now, as they don’t match the master filter.

I then type in the new master filter “WBW, and the settings appear as shown on the right. All your new settings will show up. Go throguh them in turn and make sure they load the correct symbol catalog. You can also set the properties that get set when the respective button is pressed. That by default the overland catalog toolbar loads the following six settings: Border, Coast, Mountains, Natural, Structures and Vegetation. Everything else, like Cartouches have to be loaded through the All Catalog Settings button.

Now we need to set up the master filter itself, as so far we’ve only decided on its name. Right click the Symbol Style Toggle button on the left toolbar and choose “Master Filter Settings”. Rename Filter 1 to “WBW” and save the setting under the same name.

Now we just need to tell the template to load the master filter on startup. As above, go to the OnOpenMacro and OnNewMacro map notes and change the line
“SYMICONFLOAD CA145”
to
“SYMICONFLOAD WBW”.

And that’s all for setting up the symbol catalogs for a style. Depending on how many new symbols and catalogs you create it can be quite a bit of work of course, but the basic procedure is always the same.

In the next article – which hopefully will not take quite as long to follow – we’ll look at setting up the drawing tools of the new style.

CC3+ comes with a bunch of fills, and with the official and un-official add-ons out there, you have a large amount of different fills available to you. But no matter how many fills you have, you always find yourself needing something you don’t have (or is that just me?).

In this article, we’ll take a look at some ways to get more out of your existing fills. We’ll look at using effects, layering fills, and manipulating fill scale, all in the name of producing more variety for our maps.

Note that all the techniques here uses the resources already in the map, which means you can still share your map file with others without them getting red X’es due to custom fills.

All images in this article are clickable to see larger versions. This is recommended to see the details properly.

Changing Colors

Both the ‘Adjust Hue/Saturation’ and ‘RGB Matrix Process’ effects are capable of changing the color of a fill style. You can utilize these effects to change the colors to achieve different goals. For example, you can use them to make subtly different shades of grass to break monotony, or you can use them to completely change the color of the grass, for example to make it look more brownish and dried up.

The image below shows how I’ve used the RGB Matrix Process effect to make an autumn version and a dried-up version of the standard Mike Schley style farmlands. A little color change goes a long way to provide a completely different visual look.

Continue reading »