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.
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)
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.
If you own a lot of ProFantasy products, or have installed one or more of the large community symbol packs, you will have a lot of symbols. By default, CC3+ will give you easy access to the symbols belonging to the current map style through the symbol catalog buttons immediately above the map window, but sometimes you may wish to search for other symbols not made for the current style, which may fit anyway. But how to best find these symbols? Let us check out a few ways which may be of assistance to you here.
You can’t make a good dungeon without having some secrets, right? Hidden traps, secret doors, concealed corridors, illusory floors, invisible enemies and fake treasure. Now, placing invisible enemies on the map is dead simple (trick being not actually placing them at all) but how can I make a map with a secret corridor that I can reveal and hide at will, and not betraying it’s existence when it is hidden?
CC3+ has nice tools for adding corridors to your map, but you have do decide if they should break the wall or not when connecting to an existing room or corridor. And this is where the challenge begins. It is easy enough to temporarily hide something by putting it on it’s own layer so toggling the visibility of the corridor is easy, but if you chose to have it break the wall when placed, you would still have that hole there when the corridor is hidden. Now, that isn’t actually a good way to keep it secret. On the other hand, if you chose to not break the walls, then there will be walls blocking the corridor even when it is revealed, which look a bit weird, and we can’t have any of that, can we?
One rather standard feature of most CC3+ maps that I see many people are somewhat confused over or fail to use properly is the screen. For example, I get a lot of atlas submissions that have things sticking out on the outside of the screen. Thus, I thought I would dedicate a small article to talk a little bit about this feature.
The screen is that white polygon that can be found right outside the map border on most maps. But why is it there? What is the intended functionality of it? And how to best manipulate it? And how to avoid it being part of our output when we export our map to an image? I’ll talk about all these things here, to hopefully give you a bit more insight into this feature.
Note that this article is about the screen entity found on most maps, and not the Screen Border sheet effect.
One of the most powerful effects in CC3+ is also the least used one. And that is kind of understandable, because it is also one of the more complicated ones. So in this article, I’m going to give you a bit of an introduction to the Spatial Matrix Process (SMP) effect (Not to be confused with the RGB Matrix Effect).
SMP is a custom filter where you have a lot of control over what the effect will do, it doesn’t have a pre-defined purpose like the other effects, but can be used to create a variety of different effects. Note that some of the results you can accomplish using this effect is already implemented as separate effects, such as blur.
Grids are a necessity when you are making your battle maps and it is easy to add a grid in CC3+ through the Draw Menu (Hex or Square Overlay). And this is quite OK for many maps, but with just a little bit more work, one can make it much prettier. For example, a common desire is to only have the grid visible over the floors in the rooms, where the characters can actually walk. And maybe you have a tiled floor and want the grid aligned to that? In this article, I am going to discuss some of the things you can do with your grid.
The community atlas project just finished it’s 500th map competition. The competition was all about making a dungeon with a fire an/or ice theme. 18 people participated, handing in a total of 30 maps. The voting is now over, but all the maps can be seen in the voting thread.
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated in the contest.
The winners are as follows, and all won vouchers to the ProFantasy store, sponsored by ProFantasy Software Ltd and JimP from the forums.
Best Map:
Coils of the Cold Coroner by Autumn Getty
2nd Place:
The Temple of the Burning Ice by AleD
3rd Place:
Kristol Caverns by Loopysue
4th Place:
The Fire of Lielt’ma by daperdepa
5th Place:
Klodevig’s Gauntlet by Lillhans
500th Atlas Map:
The 500th atlas map was randomly drawn between the maps of the contestants still eligible for a prize. And the winner of this honor was
Fifth Summer Palace of the Winter Queen by Wyvern
Great work everyone, and thanks form the Community Atlas Project for all the new wonderful maps for the atlas.
In my latest live stream, I did use the RGB Matrix Process effect quite a lot for changing the colors of fills ans symbols. I this article, I’ll dive a bit more into this effect and describe it in a bit more detail.
The effect itself is just a basic color-replacement effect, but all those text fields with numbers can look quite a bit daunting when you open it up for the first time, but you can use it to make some nice results. You can see some examples in this older blog article where I also touch briefly on this effect, but today I’m going to explain it in a bit more detail.
