We’re continuing Jay Johnson’s City Mapping article with the third and final part.

Adding Details

Little details add a great deal to a map. Look at these two images. The first is with trees and pathways in the courtyards. The second is without them. How much difference do these details make in your opinion? In my opinion, they make a big difference.

Shadows

Another detail you can work on is your shadows. I adjusted the shadow settings on my buildings so they intrude more into the streets. The places where the streets are covered in shadow creates a sense of danger and mystery, don’t you think.

The City’s History

Think about your city’s history and include details that suggest a city that has evolved. Your city should have a nucleus (the original settlement) from which it expanded. Consider how this expansion took place and the different phases through which it occurred. Think about how your city has grown. If there were old walls, roads that ran beside them most likely now mark where they once were. Maybe sections of these walls still stand or roads pass beneath old gates that are located far from what is now the city’s perimeter. What other changes may have occurred as your city grew?

Some More Advanced Techniques

Let’s take a minute to talk about some more advanced techniques I have used. Some that require using other programs in conjunction with CC3+ and its add-ons. Continue reading »

Did you know that CC3+ (including all addons) contains over 1000 commands in total? And that new ones gets added with just about every update?

Today, we’ll have a quick look at two of the somewhat more recent commands; Select nearby symbols and Delete nearby symbols. Both these commands are intended to help you manipulate symbols that are near another entity. This can for example help you clean up symbols that are too near a river, or help you select all the houses along your main street, for example so you can change their varicolor.

Below is an example of a forest with a river running through it. On the left image, the trees are obstructing the river, while on the left one, Delete nearby symbols have been run to automatically delete the trees near the river.

Continue reading »

Part II: Symbols for special places

“Over the day-smitten towers and walls of Shudm (uglier by day, all its black filth and spiritual garbage too openly displayed), the air began to sing and to ripple, and then grow oppressively silent and motionless. And then the air hardened, like cooling lava. And like lava, the air darkened, until it let in the fierce glare of the sun, but nothing else. Nothing – no lesser light, no noise, no breath of wind or vapor, neither dust nor rain – no wisp of anything. Even the vagrant corpse-eater birds could no longer get in, or out. Like a tomb. Above and also beneath. Inside – not simply a dome but an egg of leaden crystal, there was Shudm now, and the afternoon went by, and sunset, which was true dawn to the ghouls, and night, and midnight. And in the first overcast minutes of the new morning, there was not one sensible thing in the city that did not know it had been trapped.”
Tanith Lee, Delirium’s Mistress

And so, the last days of the ghouls of Shudm began – trapped by this spell of Sovaz, the daughter of Ashrarn, Lord of the Night. In Tanith Lee’s novel these ghouls were an amalgam of ghouls and classical vampires, dependent on eating flesh and drinking blood but not harmed by sunlight. As they became trapped, they had only each other left as food and after the last had eaten himself, their fate was sealed. Sovaz had chosen her very special way of revenge for what they did to her before… Maybe it was inspired by this story of Tanith Lee, that in one of the sourcebooks of RdW the players started their adventure, waking up trapped under an invisible force dome in the house of a mighty vampire.

This chapter of my map-making article will be about making symbols for special places of the campaign. For those who read the WIP thread in the forum, this chapter may contain redundancies, but nevertheless for my understanding of fantasy maps it is maybe the most important chapter.
I like it a lot when a map for an RPG campaign contains parts of the narrative of the world. That means that I like to build dedicated symbols, or scenarios on the map which tell stories, giving more information than just the landscape.

In this chapter I show several symbols I’ve made for the map, along with the explanation of how I made the symbol with the background as written in the original RdW sourcebooks.

Let’s start with the symbol for the magic force dome I mentioned above, protecting a powerful vampire who is looking for fresh blood and trapped a group of players in his home:

Continue reading »

We continue Jay Johnson’t city mapping article with part 2. Go here for part 1.

Building Construction Techniques

I think we are at the point where I should talk about some of my building construction methods. Here are some techniques for making complex structures utilizing the HBT.

Splicing

The first building we will construct is what I will call the Building with Enclosed Courtyard. The technique I used for this can be used to construct all kinds of variations and is also what I used to construct the city walls around Melekhir. We will refer to this technique as splicing.

First choose the building style you want in the HBT. Ensure the House shape is set to option nine which is the trapezoid shape and the Roof type to option one which is gable.

Continue reading »

Back in update 15, CC3+ introduced a set of exclusion commands. These commands are variations of the various symbol fill commands where you can specify an exclusion zone, a part of the entity to fill that should not be filled. For example, this can be used to have the forest fill avoid the river running through the forest.

Let us start with this simple map (100×80) showing a river running through the forest. The forest area has already been outlined using the Forest Background drawing tool. Note that the forest area is drawn using a single polygon, it is not split into individual polygons at each side of the river. For this simple example, that wouldn’t have been to much more work, but for a larger area with multiple roads, rivers, lakes and other obstructions, this is a far simpler method. Continue reading »

A map in itself conveys a lot of useful information. It shows you the lay of the land, the location of terrain features, the names of various locations, and so on. But you often have lots of additional information that doesn’t fit on the map itself, such as GM-only information about the traps in the dungeon, lore information about the different places, statistics, and so on. All of this is things you may wish to have at your fingertips when using the map. So, let us explore various ways you can easily provide extra information with a map.

Map Notes

CC3+ has a built-in system for storing notes along with your map. These are not visible in the map itself, but embedded in the map file, and can be brought up when needed.

To access the list of map notes, either click the Map Notes button on the toolbar, or select Drawing Properties from the File menu and then hit the Map Notes button in the dialog. This will bring up a dialog showing the list of all map notes for this map. From here, you can select any map note and click OK to show that map note, or you can hit edit to change it. You can also create new map notes from here. Continue reading »

In the past month, I have begun to release many of the custom tiles I use. And others have begun to join me. You can find this growing collection in the Master Mapping Tile Library.

But this begs the question… why invest time in making custom tiles? And how do you make ‘em in the first place? First up, let’s answer why custom tiles are worth the effort.

Custom tiles let you add a unique WORLD flavour to your maps. Different cultures in your world will have different aesthetics. Their buildings will not only be designed differently, but will be made of different materials used in different ways with different artistic flair. Consider the Chinese Summer Palace, Westminster Abby, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, and the Villa Romana La Olmeda. As soon as you glance at any of these images, you are immediately transported to their culture – you know something about the people that made them. What they valued, how they viewed the world.

By mapping unique cultural aesthetics, you reinforce the game world and its peoples in a deeply effective way. This is true for fantasy settings, but also doubly so for science fiction! Think back to the classic TV series Babylon 5, where each species had its own ‘look’ that went all the way to their clothing and starship designs. Star Trek does the same thing. The style of these different cultures’ structures and architecture is a signature of the species itself. It conveys a lot about them.

For cartographers, this means that we can use the aesthetics of architectures we map to convey the culture that built them. And one of the most effective ways to do this is to use custom tiles. Or more specifically, sets of themed custom tiles.

In High-Space, we have dozens of alien species, each of which has a rich culture. The humans are techno-junkies, that favour chrome and cyber-circuitry plus carpets and lit metal panels. In contrast, their closest pals, the Phoxin, are bison-sized bio-smiths that favour organic spaces, with moist loam, algae blooms, and walls of living plant matter. The Psionic Soamata, having evolved on dry crystal-sand planes, favour delicate carved sandstone facades. And the grumpy iron bugs… well, heavy metal and rust would best describe their look.
Therefore, when I set out to create a set of battle maps in the High-Space universe, I first look at who built the location where the action will take place, and then set about selecting themes of textures that will match that culture.

If I can find open-source tiles that match, great. If not, it’s time to crank up specialised art software and get to work…
Which brings us to the second question… how to make seamless tiles that work well with CC3+? While photoshop can help you create seamless tiles, I do not recommend it. Creating a tile with Photoshop is akin to pulling out your own eyes with a chopstick. It may be a cool party trick, but it’s painful and often result in things that are just ugly. Instead, I strongly recommend investing in a dedicated tool.

My tool of choice for this is FilterForge. It is a programmatic art package which is really designed for 3D modellers and digital artists. It is programmatic because it allows you to create your own ‘filters’ by wiring up small chunks of graphical algorithms to create a highly customable visual effect – in our case, seamless tiles.

FilterForge has a drawback. It is expensive. I mean, really expensive. The edition I use has a list price of US$828 (though you can get it for about $600 with special offers that they run frequently).
The good news is, they have a cheaper, less functional version for about US$150. The bad news is, that solution does not support 16 or 32 color, high-precision, hi-definition output. For an average map, that’s not a big issue. But if you are planning print-ready professional maps… well… you *may* notice the difference. But for 98% of us, it won’t be an issue.

The other limitation with the cheap version of FIlterForge is that you cannot customise the filters. But given that there are literally thousands of ready-made, freely downloadable filters, the inability to customise may not be that big an issue for hobbyists.

In short, if want to churn out lots of tiles are that are variations on a theme – which is the perfect scenario for us mappers – then FilterForge Standard at US$149 will be good enough most of the time.
If you don’t want the expense of making your own tiles, you can always grab some from the growing Master Mapper free community collection, here.

The next question is, how to design the tiles so they not only look good, but also PLAY WELL on the table.

When you design your tiles for a use with minis, always consider this rule: how will the tile’s texture ‘line up’ with the traditional 5f step grid for most games? Start by planning your tiles as 1200×1200 pixel images. Why 1200×1200? First of all, it is a standard size used by ProFantasy for hi-res files. Secondly, 1200 is a very flexible number – it can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Which means is can scale well as a repeating texture for many different mapping situations.

I make the assumption that my 1200×1200 pixel tile will fill a 10x10f space on my maps (or 3mx3m for sci-fi metric maps). This means each tile I create is a grid of four 5f steps. When designing the tile, I try to take into account that it will be aligned to a 5f grid, and I make sure that design enhances that grid, or at the very least does not clash with it. Check out my video on how to use the latest edition of FilterFilter to make tiles here.

Once you’ve made the tiles, it’s time to bring them into CC3+. The first thing to do is collect all the tiles of a similar theme into a single folder. Then move that folder of tiles into the CC3+ bitmap tiles folder. This can be a little tricky to find, depending on your computer’s setup. You can see how do this in the following video. The reason you put the files into this special folder is it ensure that your maps can be loaded onto other computers without incurring massive amounts of rework. Trust me. This little extra step now will save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Now fire up CC3+ and create a new map or load a map where you’d like to use your new tiles. Click on TOOLS and select Import Bitmap Fill Styles.

On the screen that pops up, make sure you have the “relative to CC3 path” set and click the Browse button to locate the folder where your tiles are located. Select and open any one tile in that folder.
Next check ‘Scaled” and then set the width and height for your tile to 10f.

Click on OK and bob’s your uncle – you’ve now added those fills to your map that you can use just like all the other standard fills. The part 2 video, above, shows you the entire process.

So, to summarize:

1. Create groups of themed custom tiles to highlight the cultural aesthetics in your world.
2. Consider using a dedicated texture / tile making solution, such as FilterForge
3. Download sets of tiles from the Master Mapping Community Library, here.
4. When creating your own tiles, make then 1200×1200 pixels and plan for them to be placed on your maps at 10fx10f scale (or 3mx3m scale for metric maps).
5. Always move your files in folders under the ProFantasy Bitmap Tiles folder.
6. Using the Tools – Import Bitmap Fill Styles function to get your tiles loaded into your maps.

Best regards, Joe

All images are by unknown authors, licensed under CC BY-SA.

One of the more common questions from CC3+ users is about how to extract a region from a large-scale map and develop this region as a more detailed local map.

The basics for doing this is already explained in the User Manual that comes with CC3+, but for this article, I am going to go a bit more into detail and explain the various tools and processes involved in doing this.

The basic principles behind this operation is to create a new map of the desired size, then copy over the entities from the existing map, trim down these entities to fit the new map size, and finally add additional detail to the new local map. Let us explore the tools and procedure for doing this.

The main tools you’ll need for doing this is Clipboard Copy, Trace, Break and Split, as well as some minor Node Editing.

Let us get started. For this article, I’ll use the example map from the User Manual. You’ll find this map in @Tutorials\UserManual\Example.fcw (remember that the @-sign refers to your CC3+ data directory). My goal is to take the area marked with the red rectangle and develop that into a local map of that area. The marked area here is 30 by 20 miles.

Note that all images in this tutorial are clickable to see higher resolution versions to more easily see what the text describes.

If you are new to this, I also highly recommend loading up the same tutorial map I use and try to follow along with this tutorial, exporting the same area, rather than try directly on your own map. Following along on this map lets you more easily see that things happens the way I describe them, and lets you build familiarity with the tools before starting on your own map.

There is also a video accompanying this article, showing me perform the steps described herein. Note that this video is not intended as a stand-alone video tutorial, but rather as a visual aid to help you see how things are supposed to work. You do not need to watch the video to take full advantage of this article, it is completely optional.

Continue reading »

I’ve made quite some styles for the annuals over the years. I actually don’t remember exactly how many but I think it is around 15 styles so far. Whenever I make my maps I always wonder if the map I make can be made into a style for CD3. Most of my styles have been made this way. Two examples are the maps I made for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG campaigns Mythos Expedition (September ’14) and Cthulhu city (December ’17). Both those mapping styles where later turned into styles for the monthly annuals. Most of the time I have to flesh out the styles with more symbols then the ones I’ve used in my maps, so that the style will work on its own.

Other times I’ve made some styles when I’ve felt that I’m missing something in Campaign cartographer 3 or any of its add-ons. One example is my latest style, City ruins for City Designer 3. One of the things I really like is to just make different versions of villages and cities. It’s actually something I can sit and play with just for fun, dreaming up different places and try to make them as good looking as possible. But sometimes I feel that the styles in the program miss some bits and pieces, for example I had an idea of a map that I originally got from an old map of Firenze in Italy where people lived among the ruins from the Roman times. After the fall of the Western part of the Roman Empire the population in many towns shrank and a lot of the old buildings started to fall apart or where used as quarries. But in the middle of those fallen cities life continued and people built new houses among the ruins. This was the kind of city I wanted to draw. But I needed more ruins.

So I started making my own ruins to be able to make the map I wanted. After a while I thought that this might be something others miss too so I decided to ask Profantasy if they might be interested in making a style out of the symbols, which they were.

So how do I make the actual style? Well first of all I have to decide on what kind of symbols I need to draw. This is usually a process that continues during the whole time I’m making the style, since I seldom come up with all ideas at once. Another way of coming up with ideas for a style is actually to ask you, the users of the program, which is possible now since I found the Campaign Cartographer 3+ Facebook User Group on Facebook. This is the perfect place to find out if there is anything the community would like to see in the style.

When I have come up with enough ideas for symbols I start to sketch them out in Photoshop. Usually I have a square grid as a bottom layer which makes it easier to make straight lines and to get the right scale on all the different symbols. After having finished the sketches it is time to ink the symbols. This I will do on a separate layer. Usually all steps will be made on different layers, which will make it much easier to change things later if necessary. After inking the symbols I add a layer for colours, sometimes I also add a layer for shadows, if needed.

When I have all my different layers done, the symbols are finished and I cut them up in different files, one per symbol, and send them over to Ralf who will do the magic of turning them into a style for all of you to use.

I hope you will like all the ruins, I sure will, and now I just have to make that map of the ruined city.

Here it is: the full release of Dioramas 3. Pimp your game and create your own paper models with hundreds of new bitmaps and symbols to choose from.

Design your model in real-world scale and then print at whatever modeling scale you want to build. Pick a pre-defined model from our large range of samples and adjust it to your requirements, or build something new completely from scratch.

Dioramas 3 includes instructions for printing and assembling your paper model so you don’t need any prior experience in paper modelling and the included examples give you plenty of material to practice on.

Dioramas 3 is available as an upgrade from Dioramas Pro and features the following new material:

• Two new bitmap drawings styles in addition to the updated vector style.
• 275 new bitmap textures (compared to 22 in Dioramas Pro)
• 700 bitmap symbols of doors, windows and other wall features
• Loading/saving of diorama panel settings (no more setting them up for each new panel)
• Sheet support for Dioramas tools

Get Dioramas 3 now from the ProFantasy online store. Or log into your registration page to grab the upgrade from Dioramas Pro.

If you want to try your hand at paper modeling with craft knife and glue before you jump fully into Dioramas 3, we have two examples buildings for you to download in pdf format.

Sage’s Tower
The reclusive sage dwells in this lonely tower somehwere on the outskirts of cilized lands. What will the adventurers find inside when they arrive to get his advice?

Village House, Church and Tower
A tiny village nestles into hills, sporting a few houses, a church and a lonely tower, guarding the townsfolk from marauding orcs and goblins.