I’m excited to have another wonderful parade of user maps for you, this time from February of this year. If you like any of them (and I’m sure you will), head over to their respective posts on the forum or Facebook (click the image to do so), and comment and like their work. I’m sure they will appreciate that!
Daniel Pereda De Pablo‘s work is always amazing, so starting with The Icebox dungeon map was a no brainer for me.
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In most overland styles, such as the CC3 Mike Schley Overland you’ll find that when you draw a terrain, such as the hills, the edge of your polygon will fade into the land behind it, allowing for a smooth transition between the two. This is of course done by the Edge Fade, Inner effect, and will only be visible as long as effects are enabled.
So, well and fine, but now we want the central part of our hilly area to be mountainous, so we just use the drawing tool and draw us some mountain terrain on top of the hill terrain. But then we notice something, the mountain fill is not fading into the terrain fill beneath it. Now, why would that be? It is on the same sheet as the hill fill (the LAND FEATURES sheet in case of CC3 Mike Schley Overland), and that clearly fades, so what is up here?
The answer to that is simple, effects are per-sheet, not per-entity, so what the Edge Fade, Inner effect is fading the combined outline of all the entities on the sheet, not the outline of each individual entity. In my example case here, the mountain terrain is fully inside the hills terrain, so the outline is here described by the hills terrain alone. If the mountain terrain had been sticking out somewhere, we would have seen that that part of the mountain terrain would have had edge fading applied to it, as would be the case if we delete the hills altogether and just keep our mountains.
So, let us look at how to handle this. Continue reading »
The Cartographer’s Annual subscription for 2023 is now available, and you can subscribe at a reduced cost. If you are a current subscriber, be sure to check your email, as you should have received your re-subscription offer that way. Otherwise, visit the Annual web page for the early subscription discount.
We have the first three issues lined up, starting with an revisit and expansion of the 13th Age style by Lee Moyer. It will be redone with all the latest effects and tools of CC3+, and significantly expanded with new symbols and textures.
Next in line is a new style by Pär Lindström, a beautiful set of artwork for drawing small towns and villages in a desert oasis style. Check out the ProFantasy Facebook community to see more previews of his work. And then in March (or possibly April) Sue Daniel provides a beautiful new take on her outdoor battle maps, this time in a Winter theme.
As always, subscribing to the Annual will give you access to all twelve monthly issues as they are released, plus a bonus issue at the end of the year. If you want to see an example of all the great content you will receive, check out the Annual 2022.
Whenever you start a new map in CC3+, it is always based on an existing template. But did you know you can easily create your own custom templates, ensuring that it already comes configured with your custom sheets and effects setup, your own fills, and more?
A template in CC3+ is really just a map. When you create a new map, what happens is that CC3+ makes a copy of the template for you as the starting point of your new map. So editing a template is just as simple as editing a map, the only trick with templates is knowing where to find them and where to put them.
Customizing templates is also the first step to creating your own custom style, which have been covered in other articles.
EucalyptusNow over on the Profantasy community forum posted an excellent little tutorial on creating decorative symbols by tracing graphics from other sources, and we thought it would be great to share this on the blog. So break out your mapping tools and follow along.
This is a tutorial for creating vignettes / decoration symbols out of rounded polygons by tracing existing images.
I’ve more or less stumbled upon this method, after I wanted a spider to decorate a map and could not find one exactly like I wanted, so I drew/ traced it.
Step One: Determine what you want for your map.
Based on the opinion of a certain younger member of our household, I’m going to use a unicorn as an example. It should be suitable as a crest, stamp or as a general map decoration.
Step Two: Find a suitable source image:
This image could be any drawing, picture or even photo. The most important thing is that the general shape of what you want to trace matches what you want.
Please keep copyright in mind if you are planning to use the created symbol for a map you are going to publish. I try to use public domain images whenever possible.
After some searching around, I’ve found this public domain crest on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blason_ville_fr_SaintLo_(Manche).svg
Continue reading »
I often use boxes to put information like a map key or the map title in as I like to separate these things from the map itself. Creating such a box is easy enough, I usually just use the Box 
command to draw an appropriate box with a nice fill on a dedicated sheet, slap a quick effect on it like edge fade and/or transparency and I am done. If you did the first map tutorial in the CC3+ user manual, this was one of the final steps when we completed the map in the text chapter.
But, what if I want to make it a little neater, like for example adding rounded corners to it? CC3+ doesn’t have a ready to go rounded corner tool out of the box, but we can easily assemble one ourselves with a few simple steps. And of course, once you have made the shape, you can throw whatever fills and effects on it that you want.
Ever wanted to add your own buttons to the CC3+ toolbars? Perhaps you have a command you use frequently, or just want quick access to a symbol catalog?
CC3+ doesn’t have a built-in editor to do this, but all it takes is a few simple changes in a text file to make it happen.
In this blog post, I am going to go through the basics for adding a new button to your toolbar. To keep it simple, I’ll just focus on buttons, although there are other things you can do in the menu as well, such as adding pop-up menus when you right click a button, but I’ll just cover the basics for now.
If you like, you can also watch the basics of this article as a video, and then come back to check out additional details in the article later.
Most of you have heard about macros. If you are an existing CC3+ user you’ve used them, knowingly or not, and you might even have written your own. For some people, the word macro may sound a little scary because it is associated with programming, but they’re really not that complicated.
Macros are used in a lot of places in the program. For example, when you start a new map or load an existing map, CC3+ uses a macro (stored in the OnNewMacro/OnOpenMacro map notes) to show you the appropriate toolbars and load the filters needed for the style of the map. A lot of the drawing tools uses macros to accomplish the more complex stuff, for example the forest drawing tools use a macro to call the commands to fill the area with trees, or the fields drawing tools in several styles use a macro to align the fields to the first edge of the polygon (These macros are stored with the drawing tools).
Lastly, CC3+ also has a macro file that contains named macros. These are often called from the toolbar buttons and menu elements in the program, so editing this file may change how the program behave.
And then we have script files….
Dear map-makers! Welcome to the July newsletter and our look at what the last month had in store.
News
Resources
Articles
Reminders
The July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available. Inspired by my recent trip to the Outer Hebrides it focuses on island chains and archipelagoes with their highly complex outlines, which can be difficult to reproduce.
It’s both a style pack with its Island Chains overland style and tool bundle, providing symbols and tools that make drawing the eponymous islands a breeze. The accompanying 6-page mapping guide takes you through creating a map in the new style as well as how to make the issue’s tools available in any other overland drawing style.
The July issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.
