Here is another set of awesome user-created maps that caught our eyes this last month. As always, selected by the elaborate and top secret processes of ProFantasy’s evaluation method (summed up as “Hey, that’s cool!”). Share your own on the Profantasy community forum or the Facebook user group.

The border outpost of Tarkas is Texas Jake‘s first village/town/city map created with CC3+ and it looks wonderful, not least to the great background texture that he created himself.

Continue reading »

We were sent this wonderful little pirate treasure map via Facebook by CC3+ user Marilyn Velez, together with the following delightful story – fit for Halloween. This was just so nice a gesture, we had to share it with the community:

‘Tis The Great Isle of The Northern Seas, otherwise known as Missing Bone Island. Legend says, if you stare long enough at its reflection, a great beast with ripping jaws, and no eyes, stares back at ya, and you’re never heard from again, much like Davy Jones’ Locker, except this beast drew pirates to their death, but if lucky, a great treasure is to be had. Yes. That’s right, a treasure, indeed, but not just any treasure. The treasure of the worlds’ most notorious pirate, Bearded Jack, and if lucky, you’ll even find yourself some Grog and Clap of Thunder to drink along the way, but don’t go gettin three sheets to the wind on me now, and if you see him, blow the man down! Keelhaul and cleave him to the brisket! Oh, what’s that? why you ask?

However, the tales didn’t cease there matey. They say Bearded Jack not only killed his men, but impaled them by the Olde Salt Point so that their haunting stares would cause great fright, and cease anyone from entering or nearing the shores. They claim he scattered his treasure throughout the island, burying it deep beneath, where no one would find it; not even the best of hunters. However, as the years passed, sailors say coins resurfaced containing the stain of Bearded Jack, some, even had his face. Till this day, they claim all who gape long enough into his eyes are visited by his spirit.

Thank you, Marilyn!

P.S.: Do you have maps you want to share and perhaps see featured on the blog? Come over to the Campaign Cartographer Facebook community, or the ProFantasy community forum, and you’ll find a superbly friendly user community.

CC3+ comes with a bunch of fills, and with the official and un-official add-ons out there, you have a large amount of different fills available to you. But no matter how many fills you have, you always find yourself needing something you don’t have (or is that just me?).

In this article, we’ll take a look at some ways to get more out of your existing fills. We’ll look at using effects, layering fills, and manipulating fill scale, all in the name of producing more variety for our maps.

Note that all the techniques here uses the resources already in the map, which means you can still share your map file with others without them getting red X’es due to custom fills.

All images in this article are clickable to see larger versions. This is recommended to see the details properly.

Changing Colors

Both the ‘Adjust Hue/Saturation’ and ‘RGB Matrix Process’ effects are capable of changing the color of a fill style. You can utilize these effects to change the colors to achieve different goals. For example, you can use them to make subtly different shades of grass to break monotony, or you can use them to completely change the color of the grass, for example to make it look more brownish and dried up.

The image below shows how I’ve used the RGB Matrix Process effect to make an autumn version and a dried-up version of the standard Mike Schley style farmlands. A little color change goes a long way to provide a completely different visual look.

Continue reading »

We skipped a month in August, so I had to look through even more awesome maps to present you for September! As always the selection is very hard and I’m not generally choosing by “best” or “most artistic criteria”, but simply by what catches my eye. It may be a great first map, an idea I’ve never seen before or anything else really. Enjoy!

Danel Yeaman created this dockside building and shared in the Facebook community. I love the simple little ship docked there at the Old Fishery!

Continue reading »

Welcome to the September newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere the summer is drawing to a close and we are preparing for the second big convention of the year (Spiel in Germany) and busy autumn season.

News

• Find out what’s on the Cartographer’s Desk and what progress we are making on our next releases.
• Check out the August and September Annual issues.

Resources

• We’ve released a mini add-on for City Designer 3: The Celtic Village symbols by Scott Aniolowski.
• Remy takes a look at map notes in CC3+ drawings and what uses they have.
• The question of how to take a section of a regional map and create a local map from it pops up quite regularly on the forum and Remy gives you a more detailed answer than the CC3+ manual can.
• We present another small selection of user maps in August and September’s Map of the Month highlights.

Articles

• Joe Sweeney takes a stab at creating custom textures – and tiling ones at that – for CC3+ and presents his new repository for these.
• Josh Plunkett presents the Realmworks project for the CC3+ Community Atlas.
• Antonios S. reviews Dioramas 3, Perspectives 3 and the Annual Vol 11 on RPGNet.

Let’s take another look at the two products we are working on at the moment: The Token Treasury and the new symbol set by Mike Schley.

Token Treasury

For the token treasury, Rich Longmore keeps sending over his finished monster portraits for approval, and it’s a rare piece that we have to ask him a few adjustments for. For example see the Barghest here. The original version (left) looks great – but it felt a little too natural for, a wolverine came to my mind instead of a supernatural monster. So I asked Rich to make the face a little more unnatural (bony face, fiery eyes) and he produced the second version (right) in no time at all.

We’ve also decided to make the tokens available in round AND square formats, so Rich had to go back and add a little bits and pieces to existing ones here and there, but that’s all finished now and we are chugging along nicely. I am converting the artwork into symbols as we go along, which should make producing the final products once all graphics are done fairly straightforward.

Cities of Schley

I know you are all eagerly waiting for the new Symbol Set “Cities of Schley” by Mike. You’ll be happy to hear that Mike has finished all the ink outlines of the buildings and is now working on the coloring. You can see just a tiny section of his preview here. To get an idea how detailed his work is just let me tell you that the original of this graphic is 9000 pixel across!

Once I get the colored versions, I will start adding the roof shading to the symbols so they will work with the automated lighting just as the other CD3 symbols.

Scott created this wonderful little symbol catalog of celtic dwellings which fits perfectly in with the symbols of City Designer 3, so we decided to make it available as a mini-add on. The download is available from your registration page if you have City Designer 3 registered. Here is Scott’s introduction to the catalog:

The Celtic symbol set started quite by accident. I was building a set of texture fills in Genetica and decided to include a thatch. That was achieved by layering dried grass patterns in Genetica and then using GIMP to hand-drawn in individual strands before finishing it back in Genetica by softening and blurring the image and making it seamlessly tileable. Once finished, I wanted to test it out on a typical round Celtic house and was mostly pleased with the way it looked. That just happened to coincide with something I was reading about the Iron Age, so I delved deeper into the details of Celtic villages. The variety of building styles intrigued me. While the majority of the structures were round, they did raise the more traditional square buildings, as well, for barns and storehouses and eventually as houses.

The map was made in CD3, Bitmap A style, with a few fills imported from the Overland catalog. It is just a quick example. I’m very excited that ProFantasy deemed my little collection of symbols worthy enough to offer to CC3+ users, and hope people enjoy and can use them. Besides thanks to the ProFantasy staff, a thanks needs to go out to mapping maestra, Sue Daniels, who was instrumental in helping me get the symbols to their final finished stage!

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 »

We are very happy to present a new drawing style by Sue Daniel for the September Annual 2018. At heart it is a city style using City Designer 3 functionality for the roofs of the temples to generate automatic shading, and it is specifically designed to create Japanese-style temples in high detail. Later in the year we will expand on this to create a full-blown Asian city style.

In the meantime this style has all the material to create beautiful temple layouts with a variety of roof styles and many bitmap fills and vegetation symbols. After all, what would a Japanese temple be without a veritable host of blossoming cherry trees?

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the September issue is now available for download on your registration page.

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.