Welcome to the second part of the Shore and Ocean Effects for Overland Maps series.

The example map for this tutorial is Arokan and Demorak, and was created using the Herwin Wielink overland style.

Creating ocean contours will take you a little longer than applying the edge striping sheet effects described in the first part of this series, but I hope you will agree with me by the time you have completed your first contoured ocean that the process is still very much worth the time spent creating them. Continue reading »

The Shore and Ocean Effects for Overland Maps article series covers a range of techniques that can be used to modify the appearance of the open water in an overland map to make it work in greater harmony with the rest of the map.

The example map, the Allaluna-Meloa Isles, was created using the Mike Schley overland style that comes with CC3.  Links to the different versions of this map have been included in this article for you to examine at your leisure.

Continue reading »

Last month, I talked about how to bring your DD3 map into various Virtual Table Top (VTT) systems. Now, that is all well and good, but simply exporting a flat image from CC3+ to a VTT do have some limitation. For example, if you make a beautiful forest, the player token would be walking atop your trees, and the players wouldn’t see what is below the trees. In the real world, when you take a walk in the forest, you actually see the forest floor, not the treetops. Same happens when your characters encounters this mysterious house in the forest. Your gorgeous maps shows the scene, and as with any outdoor map, seen from above, the map shows the roof of the house. Then your players announce they are going inside. What now?

There are two ways of handling this. The first is just to have separate maps, one for inside the house, and another for outside. Then you can just load the inside map whenever the players enter the house. But what if someone stays outside and someone goes inside? Well, you could have an identical map still showing the outside, but now revealing the insides of the house instead of the roof. But this approach still means you need to move the player/monster tokens from one map to the next.

The other approach is to have items in your battlemaps that can be hidden to show additional features. This is something we are quite used to doing inside CC3+ by hiding and showing sheets, and the subject of an earlier article. This is a very nice approach, but it is also a bit trickier. The problem here is that when we export a map from CC3+, we end up with a flat image file, we lose things like sheets and layer. There are image formats supporting layers, but CC3+ can’t export to these, nor can the VTT software import them, so we need to do it differently.

Continue reading »

As a result of the outbreak, until further notice, our flagship map-making software CC3+ is half price.

There’s never been a better time to map out the worlds of your imagination. ProFantasy’s software has always been good value, but not affordable for everyone. We’ve decided to include new, free dungeon and city design capabilities with our core software CC3+, and offer it at half-price – just $22.45 for a permanent commercial license. This is everything you need to start making great maps.

And making maps at your PC doesn’t mean you miss out on a sense of connection. Our users have formed great online communities (check the Forum and the Facebook group) which offer support and feedback to each other – get inspired, help others and have fun.

In addition, we’ve also discounted our introductory bundles further, and we’ll donate 10% of all bundle sales to The Cochrane Collection COVID-19 resources.

Bringing Your City to Life – Part 1
By Ari Gilder

Recently, I completed a large-scale city map over the course of about three months. It is only my second map with City Designer 3, so I am by no means an expert, but between the two maps I’ve recently spent a lot of hours with the tools, learning some of the ins and outs of the how as well as the why.

Both of the cities (well, one city and one town) I’ve built have been quite large for their size. I’d specifically like to consider these kinds of settlements, as opposed to a quaint fishing village or a small farming hamlet. Because these are smaller settlements, by definition less time will go into them. Also, when I was doing my research on how to start mapping a large city or town, I found very few resources on how to tackle such an ambitious project. Continue reading »

We are already a good bit into the new year and January, but we still like to take a quick look back at the some of the beautiful maps created by our user community in December.

André Franke created this fantastic map of a hypothetical Antarctica (without the ice) with the help of Fractal Terrain 3, Wilbur and the November Annual issue.
Continue reading »

Colors are important for any CC3+ map. Now, you can make beautiful Black & White maps too, but it would be a bit boring if that was the only option available.

Colors in CC3+ comes in two main flavors. CC3+ has it’s own color palette from which you can pick colors and use for entities you create in CC3+. And then you have the colors used in raster symbols and fills, which are part of the image these are based upon, and which are not changeable inside CC3+ (with the exception of varicolor symbols, but that is a separate topic).

The CC3+ color palette will be the focus of today’s article.

One of the limiting factors with the palette is that it only supports 256 colors, which means that it might not contain the exact colors we want for our map. Fortunately, it is easy to edit the palette. You can bring up the dialog at any time by clicking the color indicator on the status bar, pick one of the existing colors, and hit the Define Color button. This lets us define it as any color in the standard 24-bit color spectrum (over 16 million different colors available). Just remember that if you edit a color, it will affect existing entities in the map, you cannot get around the 256 color limit by first using a color and then changing it. Now, changing the colors are easy, but let us look a bit more a palette-wide options. Continue reading »

In FT3 you can simply change your colour scheme by loading a new one. With some minor limitation this is now also possible for your topographical maps in CC3+. Here are some supporting files:

• FT3 color schemes converted to CC3+ palettes
• Example FT3 world and CC3+ exports

Exporting coloured topographical maps from FT3 to CC3+

Fractal Terrains 3 (FT3) is a great tool to create new worlds or to visualize our own – earth. Here I will focus on how you can export a topographical map to Campaign Cartographer 3+ (CC3+) and change its style easily.

When you export contour maps from FT3 and CC3+ you usually get the expected results – as long as you use the predefined colours from the built in palette or standard colouring schemes that follow with FT3.

As soon as you start to use non predefined colours in your map the export from FT3 to CC3+ will give unexpected results.

The built-in colour palette in FT3 matches the default palette used in CC3+. As long as you only use the predefined colours when you design your own style for topographical maps, the colours in both FT3 and CC3+ will match. As soon as you start to use your own or blended colours, the result in CC3+ will look different and usually not match your style anymore.

How to use other colour styles

With the November 2019 issue of the Cartographer’s Annual come several very useful and inspiring colour schemes by the artist Sue Daniel. These where actually made for use with Wilbur (another very handy application by Joe Slayton, the creator of Fractal Terrains). She also gives an example of a colour palette for CC3+ that can be used to colourize your imported height contours from FT3. But you have to do it the manual way – one by one.

While you can change the look of your maps completely in FT3 only by loading another colour scheme, you have to colorize each contour again from scratch in CC3+. You also have to adjust the 256-colour palette when you not find your favourite colours that match your style.

This had me thinking about a workaround. There must be a way to skip the manual work of colouring contours and there should be also a possibility to make it much easier to change the
style of your map – just only by changing the colour palette in CC3+ which has become much easier since Profantasy introduced the new command PALLOAD.

Sue used 10 colours for different sea depths and 25 for altitudes. She replaced “unusual” colours in the 256 colour palette of CC3+. Why not expanding those colours ranges was one of my first thoughts. Why shouldn’t I force FT3 to use a certain colour instead of leaving it up to the program itself (trying to find a matching colour)? And how could several colour styles be used without having to export a map several times from FT3?

I decided to use 32 colours for altitudes and 16 for the sea. If you always use colour no. 223 for the lowest land level and no. 192 for the highest one then you make use of exactly 32 colours for altitudes. The same applies when you always use colour number 224 for the sallowest sea and no. 239 for the deepest. This way you use 16 colours for the sea. (Note that I changed the order of colours for altitudes over land compared with Sue’s approach).

If your world is between -32.000 ft and 32.000 ft – what are the needed depths and altitudes to be exported from FT3? If you want to have equidistant high levels then we have 32.000 ft / 32 colours = 1.000 ft / colour (and for the sea 2.000 ft, because we have only 16 colours here).

So in this case you have to set up a Campaign Cartographer Export in FT3 that exports 32 altitude levels from 0 ft to 31.000 ft (32 levels, the last one reaches up to 32.000 ft).

You force FT3 to use colour no. 223 for the first level – 0 ft. For the second level 1.000 ft use no. 222, for the third one no. 221 and so on. Concentrate on the numbers and do not get disturbed by the pink/purple or nearly black colours that you select when setting up the template. Then you generate 16 levels of depth from -32.000 ft to -2.000 ft and force the level -2.000 ft to choose colour no. 224, the next lower level uses no. 225 and so on. This is the most time consuming part of this procedure.

If your world expands from let’s say -4.800 m to 4.800 m you have to define another Export template with 150 m steps for altitudes and 300 m steps for the sea. Unfortunately you cannot change the height levels afterwards. You have to delete existing ones and have to add new ones when you have copied an existing template. Basically you can set up your heights and depths as you wish – as long as you follow the procedure above with exactly 32 levels for the altitude and 16 for the sea.

You may object that setting up an individual export is as time consuming as having to colourize each contour separately. You are right as long as you only want to create a single map and do not want to change the style of it afterwards. Until now there are only quite a few colour palettes available for CC3+ and almost all existing colour schemes in FT3 do not match the above approach with 48 colours.

So my personnel challenge was to create colour palettes that fulfill my requirements and the matching colour palettes for CC3+. With a little programming my PC did this job. And now you can take a look at your exported map. When you still have the default palette loaded it will look like the one on the right! This is not quite the look we wanted – but it is the style we defined in our FT3 to CC3+ export template!

And now to the fun part: Start loading the new specialized colour palettes and see what happens. Download some example color schemes for FT and CC3+ here.

We start by typing PALLOAD into the command line and press enter. We press enter once again – no entry given for the palette name. A file selection dialog opens and you can pick the colour palette of your choice – here I use the one with the same name that I used for my FT3 visualisation. It’s the Wilbur Old Map style – based on an idea by Sue. (Eventually you have to press enter two times again before the effect takes place).

Compared to the original map (generated in FT3) this one exactly matches our style in CC3+. Finally, you can change the style easily only by loading another colour palette – and there are quite a lot to choose from. Your map gets a totally different look in no time…

Here are a couple examples in the Dark Parchment and Arctic styles.

About André alias WeathermanSweden

André has been working as a forecaster southwest of Sweden’s Capital Stockholm for many years. While weather maps were his daily duty he always had a big favour for astronomical and topographical maps as well. He is fascinated by fantasy worlds and loves all the incredible maps presented by the community. Since he has been back to his roots in northern Germany he runs a little campsite together with his parents south of Lübeck. Despite the weather and the stars he is also interested in 3D rendering, photography and nature, where he spends a lot of time with his dog.

This is the third article in my series about XP development. To understand this article properly, you should be familiar with the contents of the previous articles.

When writing commands for CC3+, we frequently need to communicate with the user. This is often in the form of requesting some data from the user, such as where to place a node or which color to use, or we want to provide information to the user, such as instructions on the command line or the information the user requested. In this article, I’ll talk about the Text Formatting & Output Service (FormSt) used to prepare data to display to the user, and the data request format (ReqData). We have been touching both of these briefly in the two prior articles, but it is time to discuss these a bit more in depth.

Continue reading »

Update 22 for CC3+ was just released, and in addition to fixing a couple of issues, it also includes some improved commands, as well as a few brand new ones. Let us have a look at these and how you can use them.

Trace

A new command for tracing the outline of images (and other CC3+ entities) and turning them into CC3+ entities have been added. This new command, simply called Trace is an easier to use variant of the Contours command from Update 16, and it also support colors.

There are two new commands here, TRACED and TRACE. The former allows you to select entities for tracing, and then it will pop up a dialog where you can set various parameters, while the latter is the silent version which just executes the trace using the current parameters (either set by using the dialog version, otherwise it uses default ones). The options in the dialog are as follows: Continue reading »