Last month, 
I talked about how to draw railroad tracks for your maps. In that article, we looked at how to draw the basic tracks and sleepers, and adding appropriate effects to make them look nice. But we can’t stop with just straight track segments, can we? Of course not, we’ll be needing to make ourselves some nice curves. Fortunately, CC3+ has the tools needed to be able to take our railroads to the next step.
News
- The June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is available, with asymbol pack compatible with Dungeons of Schley, including trains, tracks, vehicles and lots of strange machinery.
- GenCon 2023 is drawing near and Profantasy will be there, at booth #515 of the exhibition all.
Resources
- The latest free monthly symbols by Mike Schley let you populate your city streets with a variety of wagons and carriages.
- Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
- Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for May, hopefully inspiring yourself for new mapping projects.
Articles
- Remy teaches us how to draw tracks and rail lines in his latest article. How convenient seeing the June Annual’s focus on trains!
- Christina Trani continues with her “All the Annuals” series going through all the Annual issues over the years. In this iteration she creates a map using the Empire of the Sun style.
Reminders
- CC3+ has been updated to version 3.98 (Update 28) which is available from your registration page.
- Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
- Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.
Trains and Rails are useful for all kinds of mapping. From the humble carts on a track used in mines, to daring train heists in the Wild West, through subways and all the way to modern high-speed bullet trains. They can be used for battle maps to play out interesting encounters, as scenery in your mine maps and part of the infrastructure of your city.
In this first part I’ll be having a look at creating the basic tracks.
(I’ll also be looking at this in tomorrow’s live stream, so join the stream or watch the archived video later if you wish a video version of this)
In CC3+, we use polygons a lot. They are used when you draw a landmass, they are used when you draw the floor of your building, they are used for your terrain fills and so on. Basically, when you work with a CC3+ map, there are 3 main types of entities you deal with, your symbols (places, objects, markers and more), your polygons (for filled areas like landmass and floors) and your lines (for walls, roads and similar).
Now, for this article I am going to have a little look at how we can do things like split our polygon up into two pieces, for example if we only need part of it for another map. And, I am also going to look at how to properly join up two polygons into one, as due to various factors, just drawing two partially overlapping polys and leaving them at that doesn’t always work.
In truth, lines and polys are mostly the same thing, the main difference is that polygons are closed (i.e. the programs draws a closing segment between the end node and back to the start node) while lines do not have this closing segment. When we are splitting and joining out polygons, we’ll actually be temporarily turning them into lines, so it is worth noting already now that having the fill apparently disappear while doing this is completely normal, and it will return when we are done. This also means that the procedures described here are the same for both lines and polygons, except you don’t close up lines at the end.
If you’re after extracting part of your map to make a detailed local map from a regional map, you may also wish to check out my Large to Small – Going from Regional Maps to Local Maps article.
Now, I use landmasses for my example here, but this works exactly the same way with floors in dungeon maps and all polys in all other map types as well.
I’ve always loved some interactivity in my maps, especially the dungeon ones. It is fun adding secret doors that can be opened, rotating sections, and other surprises. If you watched my latest live stream, you saw me build a hedge maze with a rotating central section, where the inner region was only reachable if you rotated the it first using a clickable hotspot in the map. (You’ll find both a link to the recording as well as my map in this forum conversation.)
I thought I could show you a couple of more examples of nice easy macros you can assign to your hotspots to accomplish interesting results, and hopefully come away with an expanded understanding of macros at the same time.
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.
Continue reading »
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.
Subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 now.
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 »
