I like having a selection of cartographic backgrounds for my PC desktop, and so I devised a simple way of exporting map sections at suitable resolutions.
Copy the xts files into the CC3 \System\Export\Settings folder, and the wallpaper export.fsc file into CC3 \Symbols\Other folder.
Look up your desktop resolution (Start menu >> Control Panel >> Adjust Resolution)
Launch CC3 and open the map you want to make into wallpaper.
Select Tools >> Options BMP, JPG, PNG and pull down the settings. They start “Wallpaper”. Choose yours and note the aspect ratio (eg 16 to 9)
I’ve covered about 90% of screen resolutions. If yours isn’t listed, it’s easy to add your own.
Open the Wallpaper Export catalog and choose the symbol which matches your display’s aspect ratio.
The symbol is probably bigger than your drawing – hold SHIFT and move the mouse until it’s the right size and place it where you want to make your wallpaper.
Right click the Save As button and select Export Rectangular Section
The prompt reads “Select first corner”
Zoom Window into the top left corner of the symbol and choose a point just inside the rectangular symbol.
Zoom Extents, then Zoom Window to the lower right corner and choose a point just inside the rectangular symbol.
Select a file location for your wallpaper.
The new wallpaper will open in your raster editor, if you have one.
Here are some high resolution examples I exported for different ratios.
Several years ago user-created bitmap artwork from around the web (specifically the Dundjinni forums) was collected into one awesome resource package – called the CSUAC – and made available for the users of several graphics programs, among them CC3. Unfortunately this resource was lost to CC3 users a while ago, and license restrictions did not allow us to make it available again.
But fortunately we’ve now found a way to make the resource available to CC3 users while honoring the license, and Gerri Broman (Shessar on the Profantasy forum) and Mark Oliva from the Vintyri project put it into practice. Here are Gerri’s instructions from the Profantasy forum:
CSUAC for CC3 Installation Instructions
Before I get into the installation procedure for the package, I want to first point out that if you already have the CSUAC there is no need to reinstall since there are no new symbols. However, the directory structure is different from prior versions, so the two are not compatible. What this means is that any maps using symbols from prior versions will show red X’s for the symbols (the reverse is true as well). This is because the new CC3 version of the CSUAC is using the file structure and files from the Fractal Mapper 8 version of the package.
Also, please note that these symbols are not full fledged CC3/DD3/CD3 symbols. That is, they are not smart symbols, nor do they use random transformations, shading, collections, etc. They are simply the PNG files and associated CC3 catalogs.
2. Extract the file BL_FM8_Fills.zip into the CC3\Bitmaps\CSUAC Fills folder.
3. Extract the files BL1_FM8.zip through BL8Pt2_FM8.zip into the CC3\Symbols\CSUAC folder.
STEP 3: Adding Menu Buttons for the CSUAC
1. Navigate to your root CC3 folder
*If you don’t have a fcw32.imn file in this directory
Copy the fcw32.imn file from CC3\Menu\csuac_menu into your root CC3 folder.
* If you do have the file fcw32.imn in the root CC3 directory
Navigate to the folder CC3\Menu\csuac_menu
Open the fcw32.imn file using Notepad.
Append (copy/paste) the contents of this file to your existing fcw32.imn file in the CC3 root directory.
Make sure you don’t leave any empty lines inside the file, but do make sure there is a line break after the last line of content, or CC3 will crash on startup.
2. Start CC3. Click the screen tools button (Hammer icon at the bottom of the screen), and turn on “Custom icon bar 3”. I have mine placed to the left.
3. If the new toolbar shows up blank, just restart CC3 or click on one of the “Add-on” buttons in the toobar. This will reload the menu.
The upcoming July Annual contains a host of new bitmap artwork, hundreds of new textures and symbols for your starship floorplans. They will be released on Sunday for the Annual subscribers.
But perhaps best of all, they are accompanied by a series of new video tutorials by the master of CC3 videos, Joseph Sweeney. These videos are freely available to anyone, and you can already view them on Joe’s YouTube channel or download them from the July Annual page.
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I’ve really looked forward to the release of this year’s June Annual that gives you a new drawing style by Herwin Wielink: Isometric Dungeons. The style itself includes some really fantastic graphics and possibilities and it lets you create a new good looking map in no time at all (compared to if you’d do all the graphics by hand).
The style itself was a bit tricky to work with for me. Or if you put it another way, the style really showed me how much I still have to learn to completely master Campaign Cartographer 3. Maybe I have to take a closer look at the Tome of Ultimate mapping to catch up on a thing or two.
Getting all the different objects in the correct order in the map really gave me a slight headache. When you create a map in this style you really have to plan in what order to do things, if you don’t want to move things back and forth on the actual sheet. It took me some restarts of the map to get a hang on it. But once you understand the logic everything runs a lot smoother. The secret of success is to work from one of the top corners to the opposite lower corner. In this way you will naturally get the graphics in the right order and you don’t need to rearrange the order of the rooms and corridors all the time.
When you reach that point everything also gets a lot more fun. I really enjoyed working with the style and the result gets so good that you just want to keep going, it’s just as addictive as playing a good computer game.
However there was one thing I felt was very frustrating with the style, and that was that I want more! The style feels like a small taste of something that could be amazingly fantastic. I want circular rooms, walls with windows, more furniture, different floors, traps, outdoor environments, sewers and I could continue that list for another two posts. This is what Perspectives 3 (if it comes out) should look like.
At the moment when the selection of different graphics isn’t too vast a lot of maps will turn out looking quite similar. So it is quite hard to do something unique with the style, but I’m hoping for a bright future and more isometric add-ons in future Annuals maybe.
Herwin Wielink, who created the excellent June style for the Cartographer’s Annual will be producing an entire style for Perspectives 3. It will be a complete style, and it will be compatible with, though not the same as, the June style.
In the meantime, click on the image to download a PDF of the June style example.
This month, we are offering five unlimited licenses which will entitle you to downloadable full versions of all our map-making software forever. The price is $1000, minus any amount you have spent on software in the ProFantasy store to date since CC3 was released.
Ralf will also create an example map based on something from your campaign world as part of the package.
If you are interested, please email simonwork@profantasy.com for more.
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Joseph Sweeney has posted a couple new video tutorials on his YouTube channel. These cover some more advanced techniques like creating your own symbol catalogs from PNG bitmap files and adding new catalog settings to your buttons in CC3.
We are happy that we’ve been able to put out two new products last month. Together with the monthly Annual, I’ve got a triplet to announce.
Symbol Set 3
The long-awaited and much delayed new version of Symbol Set 3 – Modern is now available. It comes with two completely new bitmap drawing styles for floorplans, with about 500 symbols each. One was created by Jon Roberts, the other by Michael Tumey. There is also a snazzy new blueprint-style for realistic looking player handouts, a Modern political overland style, and the old vector style has been updated to work with CC3’s sheet effects and drawing tools.
Tome of Ultimate Mapping
The second product is the Tome of Ultimate Mapping which has been updated by Remy Monsen (the author of the CC3 Full Manual) to cover Campaign Cartographer 3 and all version 3 products up to Fractal Terrains 3 (Dungeon Designer 3, City Designer 3, Symbols Sets 1 and 2, Cosmographer 3 and Fractal Terrains 3). The chapters on the other add-ons will be updated after their new versions are released. Symbol Set 3 is obviously the next on the list. You can see half a dozen example pages of the Tome here.
June Annual Isometric Dungeon Style
Last but not least is this month Annual Issue, an isometric dungeon style created by Herwin Wielink. I’m especially delighted with the lovely artwork in this issue and spent a whole evening just tinkering with the symbols, putting together a large example example map.
I’ve started to play a simple and easy to understand roleplaying game with my two oldest children (this is also the reason that the names in the map are all in Swedish, they don’t read English). And of course no game can be really appreciated without a world map to look at.
So I decided to make one while trying out the April annual style from Profantasy, made by the artist Herwin Wielink.
It is always hard to start working with a new style, it takes a while just to get used to the style itself. What graphics are included, fields, desert, marshes, rivers, forests and so on. A good thing is to just create a couple of test maps to get used to the style, to get the feeling of it. In this case I did that, but not only on purpose. I’ve read on a lot of places that people complain that CC3 can be a bit unstable, that it sometimes crashes a lot.
Well I’ve never experienced that, apart from with one of my more ambitious projects where the actual file grew too large for CC3 to handle. But with this particular style I actually had two crashes where I had to restart the whole project from the start again. That has never happened before and it was probably just a coincidence that it happened now, but I guess that the end result ended up better because of this. You can say that I learned from the mistakes in the two earlier maps, so I didn’t need to repeat them in the final map. [Editor’s notice: If you ever lose your map, look for autosave.fcw in your CC3 folder.]
The graphics in the style are absolutely gorgeous and mountains, forests and other symbols really melt into the background in a great way that kind of hides the fact that the map is made in CC3. The only other CC3 style I can think of that accomplishes this as good as this one is the 2011 March annual overland style by Jonathan Roberts.
I also like the colour palette a lot in the style. Sometimes I think that maps made in CC3 can be bit cartoonish when it comes to colour, this particular style though has a really nice dark feeling about it. I like that.
Overall the style was very easy to use, the selection of textures and symbols are vast so you can really get some great variation into the map. And variation is very good if you want to make a map that is unique and nice to look at.
As usual I’ve done the labeling in Photoshop, I just can’t get it to work satisfactory in CC3, but that is probably because of me and not the program. The font is the same though as the one included in the style.
For the first time Profantasy will have a booth at that convention. Look for us in Hall 10, booth c-067. Come visit us and we’ll be happy to demo our software and answer any questions you might have.
Several years ago user-created bitmap artwork from around the web (specifically the Dundjinni forums) was collected into one awesome resource package – called the CSUAC – and made available for the users of several graphics programs, among them CC3. Unfortunately this resource was lost to CC3 users a while ago, and license restrictions did not allow us to make it available again. 
The files needed are:
STEP 3: Adding Menu Buttons for the CSUAC
