We have another gallery of wonderful user maps posted on the Profantasy forum and in the Facebook CC3+ community last month. All for you to browse and admire!
“Schopp und Umland” by Ute Gundacker is a WW2-style map from an actual village in my home country, so I really needed to include this, even if it had been any less beautiful.
Calibre is so prolific, and creates such beautiful maps, that I had to include two of them for the August gallery. Continue reading »
We continue with our free monthly content for Campaign Cartographer 3+. This month Mike Schley added the the thrid party of the classical fanasy trio his overland style: The Dwarves and their mostly underground cities, strongholds, mines and outposts.
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 so far is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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The September issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 is now available. Dive into city building with a great new style by Sue Daniel. The style is designed to match her Darklands overland style in tone and colors, and is named Darklands City accordingly.
The grim and gritty style contains many ruins and dilapitated buildings, and with its more than 200 new symbols and many bitmaps fills in Sue’s detailed signature style offers a gorgeous set for city mapping.
The Septmeber 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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When mapping, there are times when precision matters a lot, and times when it doesn’t matter at all and simply eyeballing sizes and positions gives the best result. But in this article, I am going to talk a bit about the former, when we want perfect precision in our work, when we need that road to be exactly 10 feet wide, or entities needs to line up perfectly with each other. In CC3+ we have multiple tools available for that purpose, such as snap grid, modifiers and coordinates. I’ve talked about these things in other places before, but I’ll put all these into the context of precision work here.
Following the Live Mapping: Repeating Textures session, recently presented by Ralf Schemmann, I will be writing a short series of blogs, or a series of short blogs, illustrating how I go about generating my own seamless tiles. My methods are similar to those described by Ralf in the Live Mapping session, but I thought you might like to know a bit more about the workflow I use.
In this first blog I will be covering how I make seamless textures in CC3 using the available symbols from a chosen style. This is one of the quickest ways to make a new seamless tile since it involves no drawing or any kind of work in any app other than CC3.
To make things even easier I have made a new template, which you can download from the link below and place in your C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus\Templates\Other folder:
This is a very simple template, consisting of a black square on the BACKGROUND sheet, and the frozen MAP BORDER layer. This black square is where you will be making your new seamless tile and will automatically define the extent of the export when it is time to export your new tile.
There is a series of red lines on a sheet and layer that are both called CROP MARKS. These are also frozen so that you don’t end up picking them at any point and moving them around. They are helpful guides intended to show you the extent of the tile you are making once the black square is all but covered in symbols.
The template is loosely based on the Mike Schley Overland style, and is designed to generate tiles that are 1000 px x 1000 px, but it can be used to generate symbol tiles in any style if you locate the relevant symbol catalogue by browsing the directory and adjust the export size.
For this example I will use the MS overland trees to create a seamless tile that I can use in conjunction with the published tree fills that come with the style. This will help to break up any unwanted tile patterns caused by mapping extensive areas of unbroken forest using only the published tree fills.
The first step is to pick the set of symbols you want to use, and start pasting them all over the black square at the default symbol size (usually 1) until there is no more black to be seen between the symbols. Don’t worry about pasting them so that they are in the correct order. Just cover the black square.
Use Symbols-Sort Symbols In Map , right click in the view window and pick All, then press D for do it.
Now to move this block of trees and copy it so that we move the edges to the centre, just as Ralf did with his sand texture in the Live Mapping session referenced at the top of this blog.
Turn the SNAP and GRID buttons on and make sure you have the 50 mile, 2 snap grid selected when you right click the GRID button.
Pick the Move tool and select all the trees with a box selection and press D for do it. Then pick the trees at the central snap point and move that point to one of the four corners. It doesn’t matter which one, as long as you snap the central point to one of the corners, like this.
Using the Copy tool, copy and paste this block of trees 3 times from this corner to all the other corners.
Once you have done this sort the symbols again as above, and hopefully you will have something that looks a bit like this
Now for the magical part.
File-Save as… Pick the PNG Bitmap file option in the Save as type: box, and open the Options dialog. The template you are using has been set up to generate 1000 x 1000 pixel sized tiles, so set the height and width of the export to 1000 x 1000. Make sure the checkboxes are ticked as shown, and CC3 will automatically export just the area covered by the black square, and no more or less than that.
I exported my example fill to a subfolder within the Bitmaps\Tiles folder. I called my personal folder User, but you can call yours whatever you like. It’s yours.
Ralf covered how to import your new fills in the Live Mapping session linked to at the top of this article, so I won’t make this article any longer than it needs to be by repeating it again right here.
This is the result of importing my new fill and drawing my first polygon with it. Remember that I said the template is designed to give you a tile that is 1000 x 1000 map units? Combine this information with the fact that symbols and fills are ideally imported to overland maps at a resolution of 20 pixels per map unit, and you get a scale of 50 map units to set for your new fill. this should perfectly match the scale of the original symbols you used to create the fill in the first place.
When you have had a practice using just one random collection, try mixing collections, or even using a background texture and spacing out your trees. You can also do this with other symbols, so you could try hills or mountains
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Hello dear cartographers, welcome to the August newsletter. Mike Schley has created another set of symbols for you, we have a tutorial pack in the Annual about repeating textures, you can check out many beautiful community maps, videos and articles by Christina and Remy.
ProFantasy’s sister company Pelgrane Press publishes the award-winning 13th Age roleplaying game.
Written by the co-designers of 3e and 4e, it’s the game that that they play at home. 13th Age combines the best parts of traditional d20-rolling fantasy gaming with new story-focused rules, designed so you can run the kind of game you most want to play with your group. Combat is fast and exciting, skills are simple and flexiblew and based on the character’s history, and each character is tied to the setting and the powers of the world – the Icons.
If you play D&D, it won’t take you long to get started.
Free 13th Age Maps and Tools
ProFantasy worked with Pelgrane to produce some amazing cartography for 13th Age.
We’ve bundled up this CC3+ content for you free to celebrate the 13th Age Humble Bundle. It includes a map-making style, map collections and the 13th Age QuickStart rules.
The 13th Age Humble Bundle includes almost everything for the 13th Age roleplaying game line at a low, low price.
Combining streamlined combat with excellent indie story game design, and packed with a collection of beautifully-crafted books, music, digital maps, and more such as 13th Age, 13 True Ways, and the 13th Age Bestiary, take your character from a plucky adventurer all the way to become an epic hero! Plus, your purchase will support Oceana (supporting the reduction of plastic pollution).
We continue with our free monthly content for Campaign Cartographer 3+. This month Mike Schley added the results of all the wars between the Orcs and the Elves to his overland style: Once lively, now abandoned cities, towns and villages, destroyed keeps, cursed crossroads and haunted graveyards can now adorn your maps.
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 so far is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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Hello fellow map-makers! Let’s have a look what the last month brought us mapping-wise, shall we?
