As many symbols as Character Artist 3 contains or how many we may add in the future, the incredible variety of role-playing games, settings and campaigns means there will always be need and room for more.

The obvious – but not always simple – solution to needed symbols is to create them yourselves, either by drawing them from scratch or adapting existing artwork to your own requirements. Because the Character Artist 3 catalogs and symbols have a pretty specific setup, we are offering this guide to their creation. It takes you through the steps of adjusting existing png artwork for use in CA3 and importing it as a symbol.

Download CA3 Symbol Creation Guide mini-installer (contains pdf and support files)
Download CA3 Symbol Creation Guide pdf

The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 has been available since Saturday (log in to your registration page if you are a subscriber). It contains pre-assembled paper figures to use in your games. Created with the new Charcater Artist 3 add-on, a selection of generic heroes is opposed by a wealth of stock monsters. Character Artist 3 is not necessary to enjoy this issue, but it also contains the CA3 source files so you can quickly create more variations if you do.

You can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 here.

Another little preview of Character Artist 3. Human figure will come in three body types: thin, normal and strong. The latter makes for good barbarians!

Here are a few more glimpses of ongoing work in Character Artist 3.

Some female figures:

And the first dwarven faces:

I’m hip-deep into Character Artist 3 symbols by now, having moved on from the male figures to the females. Here’s a quick example of four faces:

And here are four full male figures:

Work continues on the bitmap artwork for our new version of the Character Artist add-on. We’ve got the majority of the art down, and we’re thrilled by the work Rich Longmore is doing for this product. Check out these three sample characters: a barbarian, a knight and a cleric.

These are not one-piece mockups – all of them are already build from individual pieces (in Photoshop for the moment): armor parts, clothing, weapons, limbs, head, eyes, mouths, etc. The next step will be creating CC3 symbols and catalog from these parts, adding varicolor functionality, and so on.

The video shows how the different armour parts of a CA3 figure can be layered over each other to make any custom combination of parts.