In February’s Annual we are looking at city mapping once more, but with a twist: The Annual issue contains an isometric style that Sue Daniel has created by building house models in SketchUp and exporting them as CC3+ symbols.

Created as full 3D models the symbols are based on real-world Tudor-style houses and fit together seamlessly at various angles, allowing you to create streets lined by adjoining houses. resulting in a beautiful and evocative, three-dimensional view of the settlement.

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the February issue will be available for download on your registration page on the first of February.

Dear map-makers! Welcome to the first newsletter of 2019 and a new year of fantastic mapping. We have the latest Annual for you, very useful articles by Remy Monsen

News

• The Annual Vol. 13 (2019) has started and is available for subscription. The January issue can be downloaded from the registration page.
• Update 21 for CC3+ is available, fixing a long-nagging problem with cache use

Resources

• Get inspiration from more beautiful user creations in the Maps of the Month.
• Remy explains two very useful recent additions to the list of CC3+’s commands: Select nearby symbols and Delete nearby symbols.
• Another article by Remy Monsen looks at how to integrate macros with the drawing tools that CC3+ allows you to create for every style.

Articles

• Jay Johnson finishes his tutorial on how to create awesome cities with CC3+ and City Designer.
• Jens Fuhrberg continues the WIP report on his “Call of the Warlock” map.

A new version of CC3+ is available now, fixing a few nagging bugs and enabling some text specs for macro access.

Version Notes

CC3+ Version 3.90
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– Fixed problem with CC3+ crashing when running out of cache. Should increase stability significantly.
– Fixed Symbol Set 1 forest tools breaking selection method
– Enabled Outline and Fixed Angle flags for TSPECS command
– Text no longer renders as ClearType, instead renders as aliased glyphs, removing halos with effects.

Download this latest update from your registration page.

Welcome to a new year of user map’s from the Profantasy community. We spotted the following this month or at the end of last year and hope they inspire you to create your own great maps with CC3+!

The coastlines for Richard T Drake‘s beautiful map were created in Fractal Terrains 3, imported into CC3+ and then completed using an amalgam of the Herwin Wielink and Jon Roberts styles.
Continue reading »

Part III: The Warlock’s Castle and the Crater of Ghorm

Before I come to the next two symbols I need to explain a bit about the background story of RdW, especially about why its name is ‘Call of the Warlock’:

In the beginning of the world of Tanaris the eight gods didn’t interfere into the things of the humans, elves etc., but one day the god Thongmor started playing around in the world and the other gods had to react. As they didn’t want to counter Thongmor’s action personally, they created the Warlock. This is a person with godlike abilities, immortal and invulnerable, his task was to fight against Thongmor. Over the years, with changing Warlocks and with the beginning of the war of the gods, the initial task of the Warlock was forgotten and now he is an independent entity.

But as the gods didn’t want to create another god, they gave him one ‘weakness’. They created the Swordmasters, a group of people with outstanding abilities in swordfighting, who always know where the Warlock is, they always hear the ‘call of the Warlock’. If one of them fights the Warlock and defeats him in a duel (this is the only situation where a warlock can die), the winning Swordmaster will become the next Warlock.

The Swordmaster is a Player Class, which means a player can become Warlock. Unfortunately the requirements for playing a Swordmaster are so hard (while creating a character you have to role dice epic…), no one in my group ever played one.

The home of the Warlock is the castle ‘Sign of the times’, which is settled on a mountain range overarching the ‘black lake of buried hopes’ (in the night you can hear the screams of the dead souls of all the Swordmasters who lost their fight against the Warlock). The feature with this castle, mountains and lakes is, that the warlock can teleport this ensemble anywhere he likes. When the map is done, I will see where exactly I will place it:
Continue reading »

We’re continuing Jay Johnson’s City Mapping article with the third and final part.

Adding Details

Little details add a great deal to a map. Look at these two images. The first is with trees and pathways in the courtyards. The second is without them. How much difference do these details make in your opinion? In my opinion, they make a big difference.

Shadows

Another detail you can work on is your shadows. I adjusted the shadow settings on my buildings so they intrude more into the streets. The places where the streets are covered in shadow creates a sense of danger and mystery, don’t you think.

The City’s History

Think about your city’s history and include details that suggest a city that has evolved. Your city should have a nucleus (the original settlement) from which it expanded. Consider how this expansion took place and the different phases through which it occurred. Think about how your city has grown. If there were old walls, roads that ran beside them most likely now mark where they once were. Maybe sections of these walls still stand or roads pass beneath old gates that are located far from what is now the city’s perimeter. What other changes may have occurred as your city grew?

Some More Advanced Techniques

Let’s take a minute to talk about some more advanced techniques I have used. Some that require using other programs in conjunction with CC3+ and its add-ons. Continue reading »

Belated welcome to the Cartographer’s Annual 2019! Why belated you say? Well, the January issue has been available since a few days before the New Year and subscribers have already created maps with the new style!

If you haven’t done so yet, head over to your registration page and download the January issue to try the new “Worlds of Wonder” overland style. It makes use of a great new set of bitmap fills and over 100 symbols to create beautiful worlds, continents and countries. Previews for the February and March issues are also available.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the January issue is available for download on your registration page.

Did you know that CC3+ (including all addons) contains over 1000 commands in total? And that new ones gets added with just about every update?

Today, we’ll have a quick look at two of the somewhat more recent commands; Select nearby symbols and Delete nearby symbols. Both these commands are intended to help you manipulate symbols that are near another entity. This can for example help you clean up symbols that are too near a river, or help you select all the houses along your main street, for example so you can change their varicolor.

Below is an example of a forest with a river running through it. On the left image, the trees are obstructing the river, while on the left one, Delete nearby symbols have been run to automatically delete the trees near the river.

Continue reading »

In CC3+, drawing tools are great timesavers. The basic functionality of a drawing tool is that it works as a preset that contains all the various settings required, such as line style, fill style, line width, color, sheet and layer so that when you draw using a drawing tool you don’t have to go around setting all of these manually like we did in the good old days. Drawing tools also have some built-in nice features like being able to draw two separate entities at once, being able to stay within the map border, and the option to easily edit an existing shape.

However, there is another very important feature that exists for drawing tools, and that is to attach macros to them. A drawing tool can contain an embedded macro which follow the tool and isn’t dependent on your main CC3+ macro file and can contain macros that work in tandem with what you draw using the tool, or even functionality that isn’t connected to drawing at all. Today, we’ll look at how to create these tools and have a brief look at how they can make things easier for us.

Drawing with Macros

If you have been making overland maps, you’ll probably familiar with the forest drawing tools. If you pay attention when you use them, you’ll note that they ask you to draw a smooth shape, and then fills this shape with trees after you are done drawing it. This is a macro drawing tool at work. What happens is that the tool itself is only set up to draw that forest background, but it also contain a macro that gets called when you are done drawing that calls the Fill With Symbols command to fill the area you just drew with trees. Let us make a similar macro that uses the Symbols in Area command instead. I won’t go into detail about Symbols in Area here, since this is about making a macro tool that uses the command, rather than explain the command itself, but if you need a refresher for the command, you can look at this article.

Continue reading »

Dear map-makers, welcome to the December newsletter! We have some exciting news with 2019’s Cartogapher’s Annual being available for (re-)subscription and the first of a new series of Products as pre-release: the Token Treasury – Monsters. We also continue with a couple map-making articles, show off more awesome user maps and provide the latest update for CC3+.

News

• The Annual 2019 is now available for subscription. If you have subscribed to the 2018 Annual you should have received an offer with the current subscriber discount. All others can get next year’s twelve monthly issues at the special early-subscriber rate.
• The Token Treasury – Monsters is available as a pre-release offer.
• The Annual 2018 concludes with the bonus issue “City Domes”.
• Update 20 is now available for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus

Resources

• We show off some more beautiful user creations in the Maps of the Month.
• The October 2018 Annual issue “Overland Video Tutorial” is now freely available to anyone.

Articles

• Jay Johnson continues his City Mapping tutorial, looking at how to construct detailed buildings using the City Designer 3 tools.
• Jens Fuhrberg goes on to build special and unique locations in his Taranis regional map.