Remy Monsen has challenged the community to create maps of snow and ice (i.e. winter-themed) for the Community Atlas Project. Already two beautiful maps have been created by Shessar and Lorelei, but there are a few more to go before the Atlas reaches the goal of 400 maps! There are still three weeks to go on this challenge, so hop over, check the forum thread, and whip out those ice and snow textures!
Varmstadt Springs by Lorelei
Staggering Moose Inn and Tavern by Shessar
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.
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In my previous installment of this series, I talked about, among other things, composite symbols made up from multiple raster images. This is cool and all, but it raises one interesting question; what about effects? When you place a symbol, all parts of that symbol is grouped together into one entity, which lives on a single sheet.
If you make a symbol that contains a small cottage, with a tree and a few bushes outside, you’ll probably want different shadow lengths on each of these components. But, to do that, you need different sheets, right?
This is where multi-sheet symbols come in. Basically, a multi-sheet symbol is a symbol that gets split into multiple symbols when you place it, thereby putting each component of the symbol on the appropriate sheet. This may sound a bit like exploding a symbol, but with multi-sheet symbols, it is the designer of the symbol that decides which sheet each part should go on without any manual intervention from the symbol user.
The January issue for the new Cartographer’s Annual (Vol 14) is now available for download. We are taking a look at the wonderful medieval fantasy city generator by Watabou and how to import its results into CC3+. The Watabou Cities style allows you create beautiful city maps with an easy-to-learn conversion process all on its own, and you can then use City Designer’s tools and resources to build upon the result for even more elaborate maps.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the January issue from your registration page. If not, for a few more days you can still take advantage of the early subscriber discount. Just follow the Subscribe Now button on the Annual website.
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 »
The December Annual issue is now available. It expands on January’s Worlds of Wonder 2 to give you many more symbols, drawing tools and alternative bitmap fills to make the style’s maps much more widely useful and customizable.
Instead of repeating another overland mapping guide, this month includes a detailed (7-page) Sheets & Effects guide, listing all the included sheets, their use and the attached effects, teaching you a lot about these features in CC3+ in the process.
If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the December issue is available for download on your registration page now.
Re-subscription to next year’s Annual will happen in mid-December and we’ll make sure to let anyone know when it goes live.
Welcome cartographers, to the November newsletter. We have the big Black Friday sale for you, some wonderful community maps, a mega-export by Remy, more work on creating new styles by Ralf and a guest article by André Franke. We also invite you to visit us at Dragonmeet in London.
News
Resources
Articles
It’s Black Friday Sale time and you can get all of our software at an amazing 30% discount all through the weekend, until Monday evening November 28th to December 2nd) on everything, including bundles and upgrades.
Just head over to the shop page to take advantage of the offer.
Dragonmeet, London’s friendliest gaming convention, is held again this year on the last weekend of November (November 30th) in London, at the Novotel in Hammersmith, like last year. ProFantasy will be there and you’re welcome to stop by to check our products, talk mapping, or just say hello to yours truly (Ralf).
Look for us next to the Pelgrane booth, pretty much across from the entrance into the exhibitor’s hall. Look for the maps!
The year is drawing to a close, Dragonmeet is around the corner and – at least for me – the need for christmas presents is beginning to nag at the back of the mind. Sounds like a good time to take a step back and just admire some of the maps produced by the user community this month. As always, it’s just a small selection of the many maps posted on the forum and the Facebook community. Thanks to everyone for sharing!
WeahermanSweden produced this beautiful topographical map of Iceland by importing height data into FT3 and exporting the result into CC3+.
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