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.
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.
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The November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 includes the “Pete Fenlon Revisited” style pack, where we extensively re-worked the 2008 map style based on the iconic maps of ICE’s maps for the Middle-earth roleplaying game.
With the permission of Pete Fenlon, the author and artist of those maps, we produced a vector style pack in the second year of the Cartographer’s Annual. Since then CC3+ has been released and many new features and tools were added to Campaign Cartographer. To make use of these, we re-worked the templates and drawing tools and also took the opportunity to add more bitmap fills and symbols to the style.
More than 50 drawing tools and over 150 symbols now allow you to create overland maps in Pete Fenlon’s wonderful style much more quickly and easily. The 6-page mapping guide has also been re-written to account for all the new stuff.
The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.
In this article in the development series, I’ll start putting the things we have learned into some proper useful commands for CC3+. I’ll be going for designing a set of dynamic dungeon tools that focuses on making the drawing of a dungeon quick and easy. In particular, I am aiming at making a set of tools that lets you draw the floorplan in a more fluid manner, and easily do things like changing the shape of a room by adding a small alcove or similar, without manually manipulating the entities. I am also making sure that the floor will always be merged to a single polygon so we avoid breaks in the fill pattern.
This will be a series of several articles, so in this first article we will be getting started with the basics. We will start by writing the code for drawing polygons, and we will see how we can merge them automatically to a larger polygon. This should give us a great starting point, which we will build upon in future articles. This short YouTube video shows a demo of what the code below achieves in CC3+.
Hello map-makers! Our apologies for the slightly delayed newsletter this month; Ralf was enjoying a couple of weeks off. But he’s back now, and we have your regulary monthly mapping goodness for you.
The October issue of the Annual 2021 is available, featuring a Dioramas set and style for building a science fiction colonial outpost.
Resources
Check out the most recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube. Remy took over from Ralf for a couple weeks, so you have a variety of hosts.
Due to my holiday we are a little later than usual with the Maps of the (previous) Month, but that doesn’t mean we are going to skip them. The maps created in our community are just too wonderful not to share them. As always, this is is just a small, pretyt random collection of maps that caought my eye. Thank you everybody for sharing your work and keep up the mapping!
Ricken used Pär Lindström regional style n the black and white version and combined it wit a couple symbols from Mike Schley to create this stylish map of the Ravenloft Subcontinent.
With this month’s free content by Mike Schley, we venture out into the vastness of the ocean. Ships, islands, sea monsters and other ocean features make up the Coastal Symbols pack that builds upon the symbols of the Mike Schley overland style of CC3+.
To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list (see image on the right). All the content up to and including October 2021 is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 contains the “Colonial Outpost” map pack, a large collection of pre-drawn buildings for science fiction gaming scenery. It depicts a colonial outpost or settlement with prefabricated houses, a variety of add-ons like a satellite dish, walls, and other little scenery pieces.
The sets are included as pdfs for immediate printing, but you can also modify and adjust the existing CC3+ drawings, as well as create your own designs with the accompanying drawing style. Dioramas 3 is not required to make use of the sets, but will be very useful, if you want to draw your own buildings. Cosmographer 3 can be useful for further flash out the scenery with additional symbols and textures.
The October issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.
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The latest CC3+ update is currently in beta, and you can download it from your registration page over at the main ProFantasy website if you wish to try it out. Of course, this is a beta, so only install it if you don’t mind potentially running into glitches and other issues (this is why we test new versions before releasing them after all)
In this article, I will take a short look at the new features that appear in this version. If you have the beta installed, you will have them right now, but if not, you will get access to them when we release the finished version of the update. In any case, there are several nice new features waiting for you in this update.
It is high-time we announce the Master Mapper award for 2020, though with all the wonderful community activity going on, it’s not been an easy choice this year. One mapper stood out for us though, not only because of the sheer amount of wonderful maps they created, but also due to their helpfulness to other mappers, as well as the inventiveness their map-making showed. It’s our forum member Alastair McBeath (Wyvern), who we name Master Mapper of 2020. Congratulations and thanks!
Alastair has been with us on the community forum since 2013, and the number of maps he has shared since then is innumerable. With the Master Mapper title we want to specifically thank him for:
Creating many beautiful and innovative maps and sharing them with the community.
Lively discussions, active help and always being welcoming in the Profantasy community.
Coming up with new ways to use Campaign Cartographer’s tools and assets, and sharing these with his fellow map-makers.
Contributing to the toolset of Campaign Cartographer via the Cartographer’s Annual.
So, thank you, Alastair, we are looking forward to all the future maps you will come up with!
In this article in the development series, I’ll start putting the things we have learned into some proper useful commands for CC3+. I’ll be going for designing a set of dynamic dungeon tools that focuses on making the drawing of a dungeon quick and easy. In particular, I am aiming at making a set of tools that lets you draw the floorplan in a more fluid manner, and easily do things like changing the shape of a room by adding a small alcove or similar, without manually manipulating the entities. I am also making sure that the floor will always be merged to a single polygon so we avoid breaks in the fill pattern.
