Dear map-makers! Here is the February newsletter with lots of mapping articles and our latest products!

News

• The Token Treasury: Monsters, the first in a new line of products, has been released.
• Take a peek at What’s on the Cartographer’s Desk to see what we are up to in the coming weeks.
• The February Annual issue: Isometric Towns is available.

Resources

• Check out a selection of beautiful user maps in the Maps of the Month.
• Remy Monsen does some very cool stuff with interactive maps in CC3+, moving a party of adventurers (or more precisely their viewpoint) through a dungeon, opening doors and triggering effects.

Articles

• Sue Daniel describes her method of creating the Isometric Towns style from the February Annual issue.
• And in a second article, Sue starts a tutorial on how to create new house symbols for City Designer 3, including dynamic roof shading..

The ProFantasy monthly newsletter typically features a map gallery, articles on map creation and development news. If you sign up to be notified by email, you’ll get exclusive offers, too.

We will only use this email address for sending newsletters from us and will not pass on your email address to any other organisation.

If ever you want to cancel your subscription, each email includes your link to unsubscribe.

You can read all past newsletters here.

You might be wondering what yours truly has been up to now that the first Token Treasury is out. Here’s a little update about what’s on my desk.

There is of course the Cities of (Mike) Schley you’ve all been wondering about. Progress has been a little slower than expected for a while, but we are now moving along nicely again, with Mike regularly submitting new house symbols – check out the gorgeous little orcish hut here. Of course the map (shading) files for all these houses need to be created, but we do have an expert on this now, don’t we?

Secondly, after the Token Treasury is before the Token Treasury. We are very happy with the artwork that Rich Longmore has produced and our customers seem to agree. So we’ve commissioned him for a second set and the first pieces are rolling in. Check out the gorgeous Papa Croc (my nickname) on the left.

There are a few slots left on our monster list for issue two (the list of monsters for the first issue is here), so if you have any wishes, post the below!

Finally ProFantasy will be exhibiting at a new convention (new for us that is) this year. We’ll be at UK Games Expo in Birmingham, and that wants to be organized including travel, rooms, booth space and everything that goes along with that. I’m certainly looking forward to being in Birmingham for the first time!

Here’s a new selection of user maps that caught our eyes this month. Enjoy!

We’ll start out with an awesome “first” by Facebook community newcomer Kristinn Agnarsson. Looks at this simple, but wonderful tavern map created with Dungeons of Schley and DD3.

Continue reading »

Software required:
Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus (CC3+) with the City Designer 3 (CD3) add-on
A bitmap editor (The GIMP v 2.10 is used in this tutorial, but any editor will suffice)

You can download a zip folder of the three files that comprise the template for this tutorial called
“House Builder (basic)” used in this tutorial from here.

Download part 1 of “Making New Houses in CC3+” in pdf-format.

How CD3 house symbols work

Whenever we paste a house symbol into a map what we are actually pasting is a very flat image that probably looks a lot like this one.

CD3 symbols do not have roof shading. There are no ‘dark sides’ or ‘light sides’ in these flat-packed roof images, yet they appear on the map fully shaded the instant the symbol is pasted in the CC3 environment. So how is this happening?

CC3+ obtains information about the pitch and facing direction for each part of the roof by reading the colour coded message in a second file stored in the same location as the image, but which is never shown in the CC3+ environment. This second file has the same name as the image file, but with a “_map” suffix.

We need to make both types of file for our new house symbol, so to distinguish between them I will call them the image file and the map file respectively.

And here (below) is the symbol House 01 arranged in CC3 to show how the shading changes with the rotation of the building – all calculated by CC3 using the information contained in the map file, and adjusted to take account of the global sun setting and the rotation of the symbol.

Continue reading »

We are happy to announce the full release of the “Token Treasury: Monsters“, our first release in a line supporting virtual tabletop software with ready-to-use artwork.

The Token Treasury line gives you a huge selection of creatures and characters to populate your maps, with frames and varicolor backgrounds to customise your virtual tabletop tokens. The art is available as CC3+ symbols and as PNG files for any graphics package such as Photoshop and GIMP. The Token Treasury is designed for use with any virtual table top software such as roll20, Battlegrounds, d20pro and Fantasy grounds.

The first release, Token Treasury: Monsters contains 118 creatures drawn by fantasy artist Rich Longmore, in rectangular and circular forms, as well as a set of token frames for depicting the creatures role in combat for your fantasy maps.

Token Treasury: Monsters can now be ordered from the ProFantasy store. If you purchased Token Treasury Monster as a pre-release, the full setup files are now available from your registration page.

The full feature list includes:

• More than 750 tokens, consisting of 118 creatures and 24 frames in various configurations, for immediate use in any graphics software such as Photoshop or GIMP.
• Ready for use in virtual table top (VTT) application such as roll20, d20pro, Battlegrounds and Fantasy Grounds.
• Frames for melee, ranged, magic and bosses to denote the creature’s role in combat.
• A guide introducing you to the Token Treasury both within CC3+ and in other applications.
• More than 500 symbols for use in CC3+ including the 118 creatures and 24 frames in 4 symbol catalogs, and templates and drawing styles for creating more token combinations.
• If you own CC3+, TT:M also installs symbol catalogs, templates and drawing tools. Create custom tokens with varicolour backgrounds and add your own frames. Mirror the symbols to add variations.

This is the full list of creatures. Normal creatures are 300 x 300 pixels, large creatures are 600 x 600 pixels, and huge creatures are 600 x 900 pixels.

The ProFantasy monthly newsletter typically features a map gallery, articles on map creation and development news. If you sign up to be notified by email, you’ll get exclusive offers, too.

We will only use this email address for sending newsletters from us and will not pass on your email address to any other organisation.

If ever you want to cancel your subscription, each email includes your link to unsubscribe.

You can read all past newsletters here.

Usually we make a map in CC3+, and when done, we export it to an image or print it, turning it into a static thing. This is required when we wish to use the map outside of CC3+, but it also takes away many fun things we can do with the map.
CC3+ does allow us to make really dynamic maps however, maps that change based on triggers in the map. I’ve already talked about a simple version of this in the article on Showing and Hiding Map Features, but let us take this much further and make a map with a large selection of interactive elements.

Now, before reading any further, I strongly suggest that you download the example map and give it a good try before reading further (requires DD3). Another much simpler example shows moving lights (Works without DD3).

Continue reading »

The Town of Corvallen has gone through a number of iterations in its role as a model for the “Isometric Town” style of the February Annual issue.

In addition to seeing the final version in the now-available Annual, you can now read up on Sue Daniel’s method of constructing the map, as well as all the small adjustments she did to make the map the work of art it is.

Check out the article “The Making of Corvallen” in pdf format.

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.