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.

Continue reading »

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

• 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).
• The November Annual by Sue Daniel is out and lets you produce amazing topographical maps.

Resources

• Guest writer André Franke presents his method of creating matching color palettes in FT3 and CC3+, as well as providing a selection of example palettes.
• Check out the November selection of user community maps in Maps of the Month.

Articles

• Remy explains how to create a mega-sized bitmap export of a map from CC3+.
• Ralf continues his series in creating a new drawing style in part 3.

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+.

Continue reading »

In FT3 you can simply change your colour scheme by loading a new one. With some minor limitation this is now also possible for your topographical maps in CC3+. Here are some supporting files:

• FT3 color schemes converted to CC3+ palettes
• Example FT3 world and CC3+ exports

Exporting coloured topographical maps from FT3 to CC3+

Fractal Terrains 3 (FT3) is a great tool to create new worlds or to visualize our own – earth. Here I will focus on how you can export a topographical map to Campaign Cartographer 3+ (CC3+) and change its style easily.

When you export contour maps from FT3 and CC3+ you usually get the expected results – as long as you use the predefined colours from the built in palette or standard colouring schemes that follow with FT3.

As soon as you start to use non predefined colours in your map the export from FT3 to CC3+ will give unexpected results.

The built-in colour palette in FT3 matches the default palette used in CC3+. As long as you only use the predefined colours when you design your own style for topographical maps, the colours in both FT3 and CC3+ will match. As soon as you start to use your own or blended colours, the result in CC3+ will look different and usually not match your style anymore.

How to use other colour styles

With the November 2019 issue of the Cartographer’s Annual come several very useful and inspiring colour schemes by the artist Sue Daniel. These where actually made for use with Wilbur (another very handy application by Joe Slayton, the creator of Fractal Terrains). She also gives an example of a colour palette for CC3+ that can be used to colourize your imported height contours from FT3. But you have to do it the manual way – one by one.

While you can change the look of your maps completely in FT3 only by loading another colour scheme, you have to colorize each contour again from scratch in CC3+. You also have to adjust the 256-colour palette when you not find your favourite colours that match your style.

This had me thinking about a workaround. There must be a way to skip the manual work of colouring contours and there should be also a possibility to make it much easier to change the
style of your map – just only by changing the colour palette in CC3+ which has become much easier since Profantasy introduced the new command PALLOAD.

Sue used 10 colours for different sea depths and 25 for altitudes. She replaced “unusual” colours in the 256 colour palette of CC3+. Why not expanding those colours ranges was one of my first thoughts. Why shouldn’t I force FT3 to use a certain colour instead of leaving it up to the program itself (trying to find a matching colour)? And how could several colour styles be used without having to export a map several times from FT3?

I decided to use 32 colours for altitudes and 16 for the sea. If you always use colour no. 223 for the lowest land level and no. 192 for the highest one then you make use of exactly 32 colours for altitudes. The same applies when you always use colour number 224 for the sallowest sea and no. 239 for the deepest. This way you use 16 colours for the sea. (Note that I changed the order of colours for altitudes over land compared with Sue’s approach).

If your world is between -32.000 ft and 32.000 ft – what are the needed depths and altitudes to be exported from FT3? If you want to have equidistant high levels then we have 32.000 ft / 32 colours = 1.000 ft / colour (and for the sea 2.000 ft, because we have only 16 colours here).

So in this case you have to set up a Campaign Cartographer Export in FT3 that exports 32 altitude levels from 0 ft to 31.000 ft (32 levels, the last one reaches up to 32.000 ft).

You force FT3 to use colour no. 223 for the first level – 0 ft. For the second level 1.000 ft use no. 222, for the third one no. 221 and so on. Concentrate on the numbers and do not get disturbed by the pink/purple or nearly black colours that you select when setting up the template. Then you generate 16 levels of depth from -32.000 ft to -2.000 ft and force the level -2.000 ft to choose colour no. 224, the next lower level uses no. 225 and so on. This is the most time consuming part of this procedure.

If your world expands from let’s say -4.800 m to 4.800 m you have to define another Export template with 150 m steps for altitudes and 300 m steps for the sea. Unfortunately you cannot change the height levels afterwards. You have to delete existing ones and have to add new ones when you have copied an existing template. Basically you can set up your heights and depths as you wish – as long as you follow the procedure above with exactly 32 levels for the altitude and 16 for the sea.

You may object that setting up an individual export is as time consuming as having to colourize each contour separately. You are right as long as you only want to create a single map and do not want to change the style of it afterwards. Until now there are only quite a few colour palettes available for CC3+ and almost all existing colour schemes in FT3 do not match the above approach with 48 colours.

So my personnel challenge was to create colour palettes that fulfill my requirements and the matching colour palettes for CC3+. With a little programming my PC did this job. And now you can take a look at your exported map. When you still have the default palette loaded it will look like the one on the right! This is not quite the look we wanted – but it is the style we defined in our FT3 to CC3+ export template!

And now to the fun part: Start loading the new specialized colour palettes and see what happens. Download some example color schemes for FT and CC3+ here.

We start by typing PALLOAD into the command line and press enter. We press enter once again – no entry given for the palette name. A file selection dialog opens and you can pick the colour palette of your choice – here I use the one with the same name that I used for my FT3 visualisation. It’s the Wilbur Old Map style – based on an idea by Sue. (Eventually you have to press enter two times again before the effect takes place).

Compared to the original map (generated in FT3) this one exactly matches our style in CC3+. Finally, you can change the style easily only by loading another colour palette – and there are quite a lot to choose from. Your map gets a totally different look in no time…

Here are a couple examples in the Dark Parchment and Arctic styles.

About André alias WeathermanSweden

André has been working as a forecaster southwest of Sweden’s Capital Stockholm for many years. While weather maps were his daily duty he always had a big favour for astronomical and topographical maps as well. He is fascinated by fantasy worlds and loves all the incredible maps presented by the community. Since he has been back to his roots in northern Germany he runs a little campsite together with his parents south of Lübeck. Despite the weather and the stars he is also interested in 3D rendering, photography and nature, where he spends a lot of time with his dog.

Some places just deserve to be exported in a nice high-quality export so you can properly examine all the details of the map.

The City of Sanctuary from the community atlas is certainly one of these places. This lovely city by master mapper Christina Trani and resident artist Sue Daniel is a visual masterwork of a city map. So, I decided to try to make a proper high resolution export of this map. The result is a map 200,000 by 200,000 pixels, or 40 gigapixels in size. The .png file for this map is over 12GB in size, and even though I have a powerful computer, actually opening this source image in an image editor is almost impossible without it crashing.

Of course, providing such an image for download is useless, since nobody can actually use it, but a far better approach is to provide it as a zoomable image on the atlas website. The image viewer used for such a zoomable image loads different images depending on your zoom level, ensure that you only load what you need at any one time, making it reasonably easy to explore this gigantic export with reasonable loading times as you zoom or scroll. You can explore this zoomable image yourself by going to the City of Sanctuary map page, and then click the Zoomable Image button located over the map image. It should load reasonably quickly, but your physical distance from my server would affect loading times. I recommend you click the fullscreen button in the toolbar at the bottom of the zoomable image viewer for a much more impressive experience.

So, how did I accomplish this feat? Well, let me start by underlining that this was not a simple one-click task, it did require quite some work and a lot of computer time. Continue reading »