As is our tradition for the Cartographer’s Annual we produce an extra issue each year and make one of them available for anyone. For 2019, the bonus issue IS the free one.
The Bonus issue “Symbol Drawing Tools” takes advantage of some recent updates to add drawing tools for mountain ranges, scattered woodlands and other terrain types to the overland styles of CC3+. The updates allow the creation of drawing tools that place randomized symbols along paths and fill polygons with a random scattering of symbols. The included mapping guide teaches you how to set up these kind of tools yourself. The example map as shown on the right was drawn with drawing tools only. No individual symbols were placed.
The bonus issue is available as a free issue and can be used by anyone with Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Download it from the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 13 web site.
A Happy New year and welcome to 2020! We hope you had great holidays and are as eager as we to start into a new year of mapping goodness. But let’s take a quick look back at December and what happened at the end of last year. We start out with the new Cartographer’s Annual, set a challenge to bring the Community Atlas to 400 maps, learn about the color palette and multi-sheet symbols and present beautiful user maps from the forum and Facebook communities.
So your New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was to finally start (or re-start) using Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus, but you don’t know where to begin? Let us help you out with a selection of great tutorials and starting points.
Video Tutorials
If you are a visual learner and want to follow video tutorials, here are some we would recommend to start out with.
Josh Plunkett does a great job at introducing you to the basics of CC3+ as a newcomer in his first video.
Follow that up with his tutorial on overland mapping and you’ve got the basics down for any overland map straight out of CC3+:
For a longer look at creating a whole overland map, check our own video with Ralf describing the process of creating a map.
PDF Guides
If you prefer reading your tutorials and follow a pdf guide, there are some great choices too.
Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus comes with a pdf Manual, that is probably still one of the best ways to learn the software. Check it out here, and follow the instructions starting on page 24 to draw your first map.
A slightly less detailed, but still very useful step by step guide to creating a map, comes with the mapping guide for the Herwin Wielink style, that comes with CC3+, available in the Documentation folder or from this link.
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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
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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 »
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 »
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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.
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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
The Big Sale! It’s Black Friday time and all our products including upgrades and bundles, are available at a 30% discount (Thursday Nov 28 to Monday Dec 2).
ProFantasy will be at Dragonmeet in London the coming Saturday (November 30th).
As is our tradition for the Cartographer’s Annual we produce an extra issue each year and make one of them available for anyone. For 2019, the bonus issue IS the free one. 
