[Ed’s note: this great tutorial introducing editing was written by new CC3+ user R A Jacobs who is on a mission to learn CC3+ – follow his journey here. It features the first map by another brand new CC3+ user Kalthorine. See his original post on the forum.]

Before We Start…

Selecting something on a screen by pointing and clicking is a very common activity that you probably do hundreds of times a day on a computer. When you think about it, it’s like picking things up with your fingers. You move the mouse to the icon that you want to open, or move, or delete; you select it by clicking on it and then you do some action. Modern User Experience Designers have made selecting objects on a screen very easy; often times, you only need to click within the vicinity of an object in order to select it.

And, what I learned this weekend, is that that is one of the reasons why you fail when you try to do just about anything in Campaign Cartographer.

Whaaaaaat?

Before you learn to do anything in Campaign Cartographer, you have to remember a few things:

1. This is professional software.   While some people report having no problems at all picking up the tool, for most, there is a learning curve; you have to both unlearn old habits and pick up new ones.  In some cases, there is a level of precision that is required in order to accomplish a task.
2. This is CAD software.  As I’ve learned, CAD software works opposite of the way you are probably used to working with most desktop applications (at least on Windows).  Instead of selecting something on the screen and choosing what to do with it (noun->verb:  “This mountain, delete”), CAD software asks you to tell it what you want to do and to what objects you’d like to do it (verb->noun: “Delete this mountain”).  The advantage of this approach is that you can execute the same action over and over quickly.
3. Watch the Command Line (CC3) at the bottom of your screen.  The Command Line is how CC3 communicates with you and provides hints on what you need to do next. CC3+ adds a new feature called a Command Prompt that provides more detailed instructions which float near the tip of your pointer to reduce the chance that you’ll miss them.  A great feature when you are learning this tool!
4. An entity is an element, object, symbol, line, whatever on the map.  Anything drawn in the Drawing Window is an entity.  Keep that in mind.

Overview

For this post, I’m going to use the Khalkaeareon map created and posted by Kalthorine to the ProFantasy Community Forums.  Be sure to grab the map, not just the image of the map.

There are many ways to select something on a map in Campaign Cartographer 3+.  I tend to think of these options in terms of “Fundamental” and “Advanced” techniques.

Over the next two posts, we are going to look at what I consider to be the “Fundamental” select techniques.  Part 1, today’s post, will cover:

• Select All
• Select by Layer
• Select by Window
• Select by Clicking the Edge of an Entity
• Deselect an Entity

In Part 2, we will take on:

• Select by Entity Type
• Select by Entity Tag Number
• Select Prior

At some point in the future, we’ll cover the following “Advanced” techniques.  I haven’t yet had a lot of reason to experiment with these so I want to better understand the mapping situations best solved by these tools:

• Select by Color
• Select by Line/Fill Style
• And, Or, Not:  Adding to or removing from a group of selected entities

Let’s get started…

Select All

Why You May Want To Use This Approach:  You want to keep the template, tools, etc. that you have created for a particular map but you want to start the entire map over from scratch.  In more advanced cases, you want to keep everything on two or more layers but get rid of everything else.

By far one of the easiest ways to select entities in Campaign Cartographer is to just select all of them.  For now, let’s just assume you want to erase everything on a map and start over – but you don’t want to pick a new template or anything like that.

1. Click the “Erase” button from the”Edit” toolbox to the left of the Symbol Catalog.
2. Move your cursor to the Drawing Window.  In CC3, take note of the Command Line, it reads “Select Entities (0 picked):”.  In CC3+, you get this same text on both the Command Line and Command Prompt.
3. Right-click.  Select “All” from the pop-up menu.
4. Every entity on the map is selected.  The invisible outlines are presented in pink so you can see what you have selected.
5. Right-click. Select “Do it” to execute the “Erase” command (or whatever command you selected).

The goal of this tutorial is not to teach you how to erase entities, just select them.  We’ll leave it there.

Select by Layer

Why You May Want To Use This Approach:  You want to move everything on a single layer to a different layer; you want to erase everything on a single layer.

Next to Select All, selecting everything on a layer is easiest.

Over the weekend – you know, when I supposed to be making maps not learning about “Select” – Select by Layer came in handy.

I was following the Campaign Cartographer 3+ User Guide Tutorial on “Converting Your Old Maps” (pp. 84-86) and I kept getting stuck on Step 6.  By Step 6, you’ve loaded up and scaled a bitmap or PNG image of your old maps when you discover that your old map is just a bit smaller than what you want your new map to be so you’ve got to move and scale the old map.  You are going to do this by first aligning the inside corners of the two maps.  To do this, you need to select edge of the bitmap (“With the crosshairs, click in the lower left corner of the old map.”).

I could not get it done¹. It. was. so. frustrating.

It is, in fact, my inability to select a bitmap that led to the creation of this post.  Since the bitmap was on its own layer, a very simple way to have accomplished this would have been to Select by Layer.

To illustrate a practical use of this Select approach, let’s say you want to move everything from the MINERALS/MOUNTAINS layer to another.  To make a change like that, the tool you want to use is the “Change Properties” tool.

1. Click the “Change Properties” button from the”Edit” toolbox to the left of the Symbol Catalog. If you look at Figure 1, above, it is the button immediately to the right of the Erase button.
2. Move your cursor to the Drawing Window.  In CC3, take note of the Command Line, it reads “Select Entities (0 picked):”.  In CC3+, you get this same text on the Command Line and, additionally, in the Command Prompt along with more detailed instructions.  See Figure 2, above.  It will be similar.
3. Right-click.  Select “Layer” from the pop-up menu.
4. Right-click.  The “Select Layer” Dialog window will pop-up.  Click the furthest left box on the MINERALS/MOUNTAINS row and click “OK”.
   1. Alternatively, if you know the name of the Layer you want to select, you could just type its name.
   2. In CC3, you type the Layer name on the Command Line
   3. In CC3+, as you type, the Layer name will appear in the floating instruction text near your pointer and on the Command Prompt.
5. Every entity on the Layer is selected.  You can verify this two ways. First, the invisible outlines are presented in pink so you can see what you have selected, just like in Figure 3, above.  Second, the Command Line reads “Select entities (287 picked):”.  If you have CC3+, the floating Command Prompt reads “Select entities to change properties [287 selected]:”
6. Right-click. Select “Do it” to execute the “Change Properties” command or whatever command you selected.

Once again, we aren’t really learning about moving entities between layers so we are going to leave off at this point and move on to the next task.

Select by Window

Why You May Want To Use This Approach:  You want to select more than one entity within a specific area of your map in order to move the group to another area of the map.  You want to select a tight grouping of related objects and change their properties.  You want to select a tight grouping of related objects and delete them.  Lots more.

Select All and Select by Layer are very ham-fisted tools. They select a lot of entities without a lot of finesse.  They have their place but, most of the time, you are going to want to work with a few entities at a time.

To start to get finer control over what you select, you can actually define a Window to select multiple items within an area at the same time.  To use this technique, you select two points on opposite corners of an imaginary rectangle (“Window”).  Everything inside the window is selected.

For this select exercise, let us assume that we want to move a the cluster of towers from near Drakenhold in the Upper Left Corner of the Khalkaraeon map.

1. Click the “Move” button from the”Edit” toolbox to the left of the Symbol Catalog. See Figure 4.
2. Move your cursor to the Drawing Window.  In CC3, take note of the Command Line, it reads “Select Entities (0 picked):”.  In CC3+, you get this same text on the Command Line and, additionally, in the Command Prompt along with more detailed instructions.  See Figure 2, above.  It will be similar.
3. Right-click.  Select “Window” from the pop-up menu.
4. You are now going to define a “box”.  Pick some point to the upper left of the group of entities you want to select and click.
5. Pick a point to the lower right of the group of entities to select.  As you move your cursor down and to the left, a “box” will grow around the group of entities you want to select.  When the box surrounds the entities you want to select, click again.
6. Every entity intersected by the box will be selected and will either turn pink or be surrounded by a pink border.  See Figure 5.
7. Right-click. Select “Do it” to execute the “Move” command or whatever command you selected.

There are some gotchas that go along with this approach.  This approach works on the concept of “intersection”.  Any entities that fall within the boundaries of the Window you define are going to be selected.  Because symbols frequently overlap, there is a good chance that you may pick up entities that you did not intend.  In Figure 5, I was trying to select just the three towers towards the middle of the image.  I got a lot more than I wanted.

So what can you do?  Here are a few ideas:

1. Reserve this approach for areas of the map where there are not a lot of overlapping symbols or other entities.
2. Zoom-in close and use very small Windows to limit how many symbols potentially overlap your window.
3. Deselect the entities you did not intend to grab.
4. Freeze the layers containing the entities you do not want to select.

Select by Clicking the Edge of an Entity

Why You May Want To Use This Approach: You want to execute a command on one entity – most likely to delete or move it.  You want to execute a command on a few entities from among a group of entities – most likely to delete or to move them.

Now we are zeroing in on it.  You want to select a single entity and execute a command on that entity.  To do this, you have to click on the edge of the entity.  Ah…but that’s the rub: Where is the edge of the entity?  You keep clicking the symbol you want to select and all you get is a cross-hair and you wonder, why can’t I pick up this symbol?!

If you look at either Figure 3 or Figure 5 above, you will see a pink colored box around the entities that are selected.  This is not the edge of the entity.  Let’s call this the “border”.

If you look at any sufficiently styled symbol, you will find a lot of edges within the icon. Again, this is not the edge of the entity.  Let’s call these the “lines” that define the symbol.  The edge of an entity is a line.

The core problem is that you expect Campaign Cartographer to work like your Windows machine.  In Windows, you click in the center of an icon on the screen to use it.  That’s not how it works in Campaign Cartographer (remember those habits I said you needed to unlearn in the Overview, above? Yeah. This is one of them.)

The edge of the entity is defined by the outer lines of the symbol regardless of where the border of the entity may be. To select by clicking the “edge of an entity” you must click the outer lines of the entity.  Clicking a line/edge in the middle of the entity will not select the entity.

In my (albeit limited) experience, it is much easier to select a single entity by working up close.  For this particular select exercise, let’s us assume that you want to move Drakenhold castle in the Upper Left corner of the Khalkaraeon map.

1. Find Drakenhold castle on the map.  It is in the Upper Left corner of the map.
2. Zoom in.  You can do this from the View -> Zooms -> In By 2 menu item, the Zoom buttons on the upper far right toolbar, or by right-clicking and choosing one of the Zoom options.  Get in close.  See Figure 6.
3. Click the “Move” button (see Figure 4, above, if you are not sure where the button is).
4. Move your cursor to the edge of the castle and click.  The symbol or entity should either turn pink or be surrounded by a pink border.  See Figure 7.
5. Look at the Command Line and Command Prompt (if you are using CC3+).  The Command Line should read “Selected Entities (1 picked):”.  The Command Prompt should read “Select Entities to Move, Scale, Rotate [1 picked]:”.
6. If you want to add more entities to the group, repeat Steps 1-5 until you’ve selected all the entities you want to manipulate.  Keep an eye on the Command Line / Command Prompt to ensure that you are only picking up the entities you expect to pick up.
7. When you are done selecting individual entities, right-click and select “Do It” to execute the “Move” command or whatever command you chose.

In Step 5, if the “Selected Entities” count is 0 or greater than 1, you’ve either failed to select the castle or you picked up something in addition.  You need to deselect and try again.

Deselect an Entity

Why You May Want To Use This Approach:  Using another approach, you’ve selected one or more entities that you did not intend to select.  Before you complete your command sequence, you need to reduce the number of entities selected.

As you seek finer and finer control over the number of entities you want to select, you are going to select entities that you did not intend to select.  Before you right-click and select “Do it”, you need to clean up the collection of selected entities.

First, double-check the Command Line and the Command Prompt to see how many entities are currently picked.  If you think you’ve got 1 but the command line says you’ve got more, you’ve got clean-up to do.

There are two basic ways to deselect an entity.  You can choose to cancel the command or deselect entities one at a time.

Cancel the Command

1. Complete Steps 1-6 of Select by Window but only try to select a few entities.
2. Right-click and select “Cancel” from the pop-up menu.
3. The items are no longer selected.

But wait! If the items are no longer selected, why are they still surrounded by a pink border?  To save resources, the Drawing Window does not refresh after every command.  If you still see pink borders, click the Redraw button to the upper right (see Figure 8), use View > Redraw or type CTRL-R.   If the pink border does not go away, then you did not deselect the entity.

Deselect Entities One At A Time

1. Complete Steps 1-6 of Select by Clicking the Edge of an Entity.  Select 3 entities.
2. With three entities selected, press and hold the CTRL key while you select one of the 3 entities you just selected.
3. The Command Line count of Selected Entities should decrease by 1.

In general, any time something doesn’t quite look right on the map, it is probably a good idea to “Redraw”.  To clean up my drawing left-overs, I find myself doing this frequently after deselecting entities and executing other commands.

My gut tells me that if I want to get good at Campaign Cartographer – to really master it – I need to spend time really learning these fundamental skills.  Just from playing around with these techniques and then writing them down for your benefit has been extremely helpful to me.

How about you?  Did any of this help? Do you have a trick for selecting objects within CC3 that gets you out of tricky situations?  What is it?  Leave a comment and tell me about it.

1. I wanted to do it “the right way” and follow the instructions verbatim so I could be certain I was learning the skill required. Yeah. Don’t do that. It doesn’t matter. The upside, is that I learned a lot anyway…about other ways to select items.

The last time I wrote about ProFantasy business was at the end of 2011, during the world economic downturn. Our market is primarily in the US, where there has been a steady recovery. That said, I think our business depends far more on factors unrelated to the economy, and more to the tiny sector of the market we inhabit, and to some extent our own endeavours. I will continue our proud and misguided tradition of ascribing most of our success to our own endeavours rather than those outside factors.

Outside Factors

On those outside factors, first, there is evidence of the steady growth of the tabletop RPG hobby alongside the continuing of mainstream acceptance of genre media (super hero and science fiction movies and paranormal romance). It’s become easier than ever before to publish table top RPGs and there are more games and players than ever before. GenCon, which features the world’s largest concentration of tabletop roleplayers has grown year on year for the past four years by 10% a year. This year saw the succesful launch of D&D 5th Edition, which has given everyone in the hobby a boost.

Sales

This graph shows that despite the absence of new version of the software for which users have to pay, sales continued to increase slowly. December 2013 saw the release of Character Artist 3, our first updated add-on for a while, and that included a free upgrade to CC3+ when it was released. The huge spike at the end was our Jan 15 CC3+ early adopter launch – the first new, paid for upgrade since 2006.

This graph gives a clearer picture of total annual sales. Our margins were cut in 2013-2014 as we invested heavily in the new version, employing Joe Slayton on a permanent contract to improve CC3+, but the successful launch of 2015 showed that risk to be worthwhile.

CC3 sales are a pretty solid measure of new customer acquistion, which you can see increased. The 2015 orange spike is CC3+ upgrade sales – high in absolute terms, but also high as a percentage of CC3 sales to date. It’ll be interesting to see if they match the total upgrade percentage of CC2 + CC2 Pro to CC3.

Our website vistor base has fractured a little, with customers looking at our blog, forum facebook and other social media outlets. Our biggest community success is the forum – the quality and quantity of maps posted there increases month on month.

More Trends

In 2010, download sales were 25%. This has increased in 2014 to 75%. In part this is a general trend, but our download guarantee had an immediate impact when we introduced it. Media is still useful for our very modest retail sales, but we are taking steps to further eoncourage download purchases over media purchases.

The average order level increased by 10% from 2012 to 2014 driven by improved take-up in bundle sales.

The percentage of women buyers remains stubbornly at around 10% (based on comparing first names with a list).

You can get an idea of our sales spikes on product releases here.

Next up, the relative sales of our most of our products for 2012-2014 – I am surprised that City Designer 3 has overtaken Dungeon Designer 3 as our best-selling add-on.  The relative popularity of fantasy over modern and SF settings continues.

Predictions

Oh, dear. I will go out on a limb and say that this year will be our best yet (in terms of sales and margin) unless there is a huge event outside our control. I think, unlike the CC2 to CC3 transition, CC+ full versions will outsell the upgrade, though the upgrade will do well. We’ll get one new product (in addition to the subscription) out, and we will have run our first Kickstarter.

CC3+ is faster, easier to use and creates more attractive maps than ever before.

Speed: CC3+ runs twice as fast as CC3 – and the speed difference is even greater with effects on. A combination of hardware optimisation,  and eldritch programming sorcery means more map-making, less waiting – simple as that.  On most machines, you can use CC3+ with effects on, all the time.

Style: Award-winning cartographer Mike Schley provides you with a complete new attractive map-making style with a host of new symbols and tools. Nothing new to learn, just better looking maps.

Effects: You asked for PhotoShop-style effects, now you have them, with faster, better, streamlined and consistent filters your maps will look better than ever before. You can test your effects on the drawing before applying them. And, again, CC3+ is doing the work.

Ease: A context-sensitive floating cursor lets you know what CC3+ is thinking. Attractive, larger icons suit modern systems. The Print Wizard makes it easy to export your maps at any scale, tiled across paper . CC3+ gives you better and cleverer editing, clearer icons, and improved export.

Integration: CC3 improves and simplifies the map-making process. It puts roads, rivers, symbols and other map-making tools up front and center right where you need them. Whichever map making style you choose, the tools you need will appear, visually, and ready to go.

Clarity: We’ve fixed bugs, plugged holes and cleaned up the interface. CC3+ is Windows 8 able, and it’s cleaner on the inside and outside.

It’s been a while since our last newsletter – we’ve been focused on getting CC3+ ready for release. This month features an exclusive offer on a great piece of map-making kit – The Noteboard, an update on CC3+ and video resources.

News

• CC3+ Update the latest on CC3+
• The August,  September, October and November issues of the Cartographer’s Annual’s are available
• The Noteboard Offer – not all maps need a PC
• Pelgrane, meet ProFantasy – maps for a tabletop RPG company
• ProFantasy Spiel’14 convention report by Ralf Schemmann

Resources

• User Maps – July to November amazing inspiration from CC3 users on the forum
• Video mini-Tutorials for CC3 and add-ons check out Ralf’s video tutorials
• Dungeon Designer 3 Battle Map Video Tutorial
• A map for 13th Age in the Mike Schley style The Mike Schley style is included in CC3+

Map-making Articles

• I Love Maps – by Benjamin Descovich using CC3 to create a map for a novel

Pelgrane Press, ProFantasy Software‘s sister company makes tabletop RPGs, and as such has a burning need for cartographic resources, so of course we take advantage of the connection. We’ve collaborated on a number of projects in a number of styles – styles we’ve then bought to our users. The latest such colloboration will be The Dracula Dossier – a Kickstarted project featuring spies versus the greatest vampire of the them all, for which Ralf will be creating maps. Back it here.

So, here are some of the other projects we’ve worked on together.

The Modern Journeys Style

Created by Pär Lindström and designed for the the Pelgrane Trail of Cthulhu adventure collection Mythos Expedition the style lets you depict the itinerary and visited locations for journeys or expeditions as would be found in horror or pulp adventures.

“>

“>13th Age Style

The September issue of the Annual 2012 contains a new overland style based on the gorgeous world map of the upcoming role-playing game 13th Age by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet. The style was developed by Lee Moyer.

“>

“>1930s Street Maps

The December Annual 2011 brings you a companion style to April’s 1930s floorplans: city maps in the same Baedeker travel guide style for your modern horror and pulp-style games. Pelgrane Press used this in Arkham Detective Tales Extended Edition.“>

“>The 13th Age in CC3+

Ralf Schemmann recreated the 13th Age map in the Mike Schley overland style included with the forthcoming cc3+.

Shadows of Eldolan

Pär Lindström created a city map and floorplans for the 13th Age city adventure Shadows of Eldolan using CC3, City Designer 3 and the Symbol Set 4: Dungeons of Schley style. He did some post work on the city map in Photoshop

Special Offer: Until next Monday you can get 17% off two or more Noteboards from thenoteboard.com or amazon.com. That’s 2 for $20. Use this voucher code at payment: ACR7CVRC

We love maps here at ProFantasy Software, but not just the computer generated kind (which we really, really love). We also love hand drawn scribbles, dungeon tiles, battlemats and Google Maps. So, when two of my game group brought this wonderful accessory to our gaming session, I was impressed. All tucked away, it looks like this.

It’s The Noteboard, a durable, portable dry-erase whiteboard, which folds into a pouch which you can use as an eraser.

In use, it looks like this:

I rushed onto the internet to buy one and, long story short, Ralf, Mark and I bought the company from the founder.

Here is a video review of the Noteboard over on Play Unplugged.

The second from Korvar the Fox

The next version of Campaign Cartographer, CC3+, is in late beta. We were hoping for a release this year, but that’s looking less likely. You can read about the new version here.

We’ve got two show-stopping bugs to deal with before we release the CC3+ beta to a wider audience.

Who is this audience?

We released Character Artist 3 this time last year, and until 1st January 2014 offered free CC3+ upgrade protection to purchasers. Character Artist 3 users will be able to download the beta version and give us feedback as soon as our two big bugs are dealt with. It’s impossible for us to tell when that will be, but I hope it’s in the next couple of weeks. If you are in this category, we’ll send you an email, and update your registration page with the new version. When the new version is finished, you’ll get a new update.

When this wider beta test is completed, we’ll release the upgrade, but we absolutely don’t want to release it until we are sure it’s solid on all operating systems.

Our estimate for the release of CC3+ was “in the first half of the year,” which, like many software deadlines, whizzed past at an unedifying speed.  So, time for an update. We aim to release CC+ in mid August, at GenCon. Character Artist 3 purchasers entitled to a free upgrade will get an alpha version to download (optionally) before then.

First, technical stuff – the main reasons for the delay.

We want to make CC3+ as future proof as possible, and we have to keep an eye on Microsoft operating systems and development environments. In addition, Mike Riddle (the developer of the CC CAD engine) became available for a few weeks’ work. This was an umissable opportunity. So, he’s massaged the assembly code, worked around bugs in Visual Studio 2013, and even persuaded the Microsoft team to include bug fixes. It now compiles with vs2013. This doesn’t guarantee functionality with future versions of Windows, but makes it much easier to fix if there are issues. This gives Joe Slayton more tools and compilation enhancements, too.

We are moving all resources away from the program files folder and into the Windows-specified location, which is a quite a knotty problem. We are also switching from registry entries to human readable files where possible, and finalising changes to the effects architecture. We can’t update all the templates until the effects are nailed down.

The main improvements are listed here, with notes from me as to what this really means.

Speed: CC3+ runs twice as fast as CC3. A combination of hardware optimisation and eldritch programming sorcery means more map-making, less waiting – simple as that. [The main benefit is that you can work with effects on on most machines, most of the time. so WYSIWYG]

Style: Award-winning cartographer Mike Schley provides you with a complete new attractive map-making style. Nothing new to learn, just better looking maps. [nothing new to learn, just nicer looking maps]

Effects: You asked for PhotoShop-style effects, now you have them, with faster, better, streamlined and consistent filters your maps will look better than ever before. You can test your effects on the drawing before applying them. And, again, CC3+ is doing the work. [we’ve been inspired by map-makers such as Par Lindstrom who have created maps in CC3 then done more work in Photoshop]

Ease: A context-sensitive floating cursor lets you know what CC3+ is thinking. [I thought this would be annoying, but now it’s indispensible.]The Print Wizard makes it easy to export your maps at any scale, tiled across paper [I use this mainly with a PDF printer]. CC3+ also gives you better and cleverer editing, clearer icons, and you can drag and drop images from the internet.

Integration: CC3+ puts roads, rivers, symbols and other map-making tools up front and center right where you need them. Whatever map making style you choose, the tools you need will appear, visually, and ready to go. [We’ve added the drawing tools to the symbol catalog window, in an order which reflects your process flow. This is more intutive and speeds up map creation. It’s also easier for new map makers.]

Clarity: We’ve fixed bugs, plugged holes and cleaned up the interface. CC3+ is Windows 8 able, and it’s cleaner on the inside and outside. [CC3+ also gives us a platform to improve all the add-ons, too and release Perspectives and Dioramas, too]

Whether you want a world overview, and solar system map, a starship deckplan, or a map of a star empire many light years across, we have the software for you. CC3 has limited SF facilities alone, though you can certainly do an old-style Traveller map, but Fractal Terrains, Cosmographer 3, symbol sets and Annuals, you have a much wider array.

This map is created with CC3 plus the August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013.

This sector map was created with Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for Ashen Stars.

Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for the Traveller RPG. More here.

Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for Ashen Stars

Cosmographer 3 calculates and shows 3D distances for star systems as in the small isometric sample.

Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3

Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3

Top down satellite cartography with CC3 and Annual 2012.

Created by forum user Micco40 in about ten minutes using FT3 and CC3.

Created with Fractal Terrains 3

You can create a wide range of cities and urban areas with CC3 and its add-ons and symbol sets. This article shows you a selection, and the software you need to create them.

City Designer 3 is (unsurprisingly) the best resource for urban areas – the following examples were created with CD3.

This is from the Annual Vol 5 – a 1930s style map.

a This map was created with the black and white city style released in the Annual Vol 4

Two styles in one, here in the Annual Vol 1. One is remininiscent of 18th to 19th century maps, while the second creates the look of contemporary street maps.

This map emulates the famous town and city maps of British cartographer John Speed (1542-1629). It was created with the John Speed City style from The Cartographer’s Annual Vol 1.

This style from the Annual Vol 3 does not require City Designer 3