Ever wanted to have something appear as a being inscribed into the wall or floor instead of appearing on top of it? With a little bit of manipulation and a few effects, we can turn any vector symbol or basic shape into such an inscription.
We can then use this technique to decorate floors in a dungeon, or used with both walls and floors in a perspective drawing, netting us some nice way of adding decorations without overusing symbols.
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The year is almost over, and we will soon be starting the resubscription offer for 2021. But until then the Cartographer’s Annual has another great mapping style for you: Tagkrammer Isometric for Perspectives-style floorplans.
We became aware of the beautiful isometric floorplan for a merchant’s “Kontor” on the Cartographer’s Guild and approached the author about turning it into a CC3+ style. Kawe Weissi-Zadeh of Westphalia Miniatures was happy to oblige and the result is the Tagkrammer Isometric style. It is an easy to use floorplan style, that can make good use of Perspectives 3 tools, but can also be used without that add-on.
On Thursday, December 3rd, the style features in our Live Mapping session on You Tube.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the December issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
Last time, we discussed how to do ruined walls in Perspectives 3. In this article, we’ll continue on the ruined perspectives track, and this time I will be looking at how to make battlements.
Battlements have been an important defensive feature of castles and keeps for hundreds of years. The crenelations gave archers on the wall a way to shoot at incoming enemies, while still having ample cover available to them. It would be a real miss if we couldn’t have these important features on our castles. We don’t want our fantasy castles to be too easily overrun, right?
I’ll start by making the actual battlements, and then I’ll turn them into ruins. For this, we will use a very different technique from last time, a technique that can also be applied to all manners of custom objects, not just ruins.
This article is also available as a video, if you prefer that format, or simply need to see me perform some of the steps from the article. Continue reading »
Perspectives 3 is a great add-on. It can be really rewarding to see your building appear in all it’s 3-dimensional glory.
There are some interesting challenges when mapping in the isometric view offered by Perspectives 3 however, and that is based on the fact that while the drawing might look 3-dimensional, it is actually still a flat surface. What Perspective does is to use angles in such a way as to make things appear 3-dimensional when it is not. As long as we can use the premade tools, we don’t have to worry too much about this, but these tools have their limits. For example, they are great for creating a house with, but there aren’t any easy tool to draw a ruined, crumbling wall. And it is a this point we need to start drawing some elements ourselves, and that can get a bit tricky when working in the isometric perspective.
In this article, I’ll discuss how to draw various elements to make a convincing ruin. It is based on the keep I made in this thread.
This article is also available as a video.
For the August Issue, our Master Mapper Jean-Michel Bravo continues his Ancient Tombs series, now with isometric versions of those Egyptian-themed catacombs! Hundreds of isometric symbols and dozens of bitmap textures allow you to create wonderful perspective maps haunted by mummies and filled with traps!
If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the August issue is available for download on your registration page now.
Two months ago we offered a pre-release of Perspectives 3 to our newsletter recipients and owners of Perspectives Pro. The offer was taken up enthusiastically and people started posting their first maps on the community forum just a few hours later. It also helped us to identify a few bugs, which we were able to fix, and we can now officially release Perspectives 3.
Here are a few images taken from the Profantasy forum of what users have created with Perspectives 3. Click on the images to go to the specific thread.
Tomb of Old King Akhanashen by tonnichiwa
Egyptian Tomb by Shessar (with custom art)
Temple pool by Shessar
Ship’s Landing by tonnichiwa
SciFi Airlock by Dkarr (demonstrates custom textures and symbols)
Custom door and windows by Shessar
Shessar has collected the custom art resources in this thread.
If you have previously installed the pre-release version of Perspectives 3, simply re-download the setup from your registration page and reinstall it. Just make sure you’ve updated CC3+ to the latest version (3.73) before you do. CC3+ Update 7 is available among your CC3+ downloads.
Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus gets a new free update and you a new drawing style with it! Originally published in the Cartographer’s Annual, we’ve decided to share Herwin Wielink’s overland style with a wider audience. It’s a style of lovingly crafted, playful bitmap symbols and high-detail textures. With more than 250 symbols, 30 textures and and more than 60 drawing tools, it is one of the largest drawing styles we’ve ever published in the Annual. Click the image on the right to see a high-detail version of an example map in Herwin Wielink’s style.
To get the new update download it from your registered user’s page. Some of you may have recently downloaded Update 4; it’s 4a you need to get the new style.
Apart from the new style and some bug fixes (see the Readme file for details) Update 4 prepares CC3+ for the release of Perspectives 3. We needed to update specialised components needed to handling up to 8 different isometric views for one symbol, add light and shade and support angled fill styles.
Here is another big example map in the Herwin Wielink style:
The Perspectives 3 pre-release offer is coming soon – look at for an email from us!
So, where is that Perspectives 3 you are talking about so much, you ask, and rightfully so. The truth is, I was a bit hasty with my previous assessment. We ran into some hiccups with the central Perspectives dialogs and to sort them out before we could move on. The good news is, we’ve now got the beta version out to the testers now. I’m now working on the documentation (Essentials guide and help files), but we might still do a pre-release for alpha users before Perspectives 3 gets its full public release. Watch this space.
You can see in the dialog screenshots (click them for larger versions) that we’ve significantly enlarged the previews for the isometric rooms and buildings. We’ve also simplified the setup. Where in Perspectives Pro you had a separate color setting that combined with Perspective and House settings in a way that could be a bit confusion, now the color settings are built into the others. That became possible because the wall shading is now handled through shaded polygon entities, instead of different colors. That also means that you can adjust lighting and shadows globally on the map, in a similar way to City Designer 3’s roof shading.
Here’s a little preview of the other Perspectives 3 bitmap style, created by Kai-Uwe Wallner. It is based on the artwork for Dungeon Designer 3, and Kai-Uwe did a magnificent job in converting the dungeon artwork by Dave Allsop into 3d objects. Because he created full models of the objects, we were able to create 8 views of each symbols, doubling the number of orientations you can show them on the map.
Here is the Evil Idol symbol from the Statues catalog in its 8 variations:
Apart from Perspectives 3 the Cartographer’s Annual 2016 is now full underway with the Here be Monsters and Empire of the Sun styles available for subscribers. But the coming month needs their attention too. Next month will see an isometric style, compatible with both the Herwin Wielink Isometric Dungeons from the Annual and Perspectives 3 itself. And then we have some historical houses/villas/manors floorplans in the work, as well as a woodcut-style for overland maps.
Also – even if it is hard to believe – the year’s conventions (GenCon in August and Spiel in October) already need attention. GenCon hotel bookings for exhibitors is coming in only a couple weeks, and that is a stressful time, as rooms are becomings increasingly sparse in downtown Indy. For Spiel, we are looking in what kind of anti-harassment policies are in effect at German conventions, a topic that’s not been talked about much here.
With that I leave you with a bit from the current Perspectives example map that is on my screen, a little farm or village scene created mainly with the Isometric House tool.
We are making good progress on Perspectives 3, November means Black Friday sale, and the December annual is demoing. Definitely sounds like the year is coming to a close, doesn’t it? Let’s take stock with this month’s newsletter.
From 27th November until 1st December Tuesday morning, all of our cartography software is available at a 30% discount, including bundles and upgrades.
Use this voucher in the checkout to take advantage of the offer: BLACK@30%.
Get full versions in the store, and upgrades from your registered users page.
News
Resources
Articles
Perspectives is clearly dominating my desk this month, so let’s take a look at what’s coming in this new edition of one of my favorite add-ons.
Four Styles
In addition to the two old vector styles that Perspectives Pro came with (vector symbols in color and in black and white) Perspectives 3 offers two new bitmap-based style. One is based on the artwork from Dungeon Designer 3. In fact the artist, Kai-Uwe Wallner, created 3D models of almost all the DD3 symbols and exported these in 8 views to serve as our isometric symbols. This means you can create matching isometric views of your DD3 dungeon maps!
The other bitmap style was created by Herwin Wielink, in the same look as his Isometric Dungeon style from the Annual Vol 6. In fact, the two can be combined for an even greater variety of available symbols. And unlike the Annual style, floors and walls can be freely created at any angle in Perspectives 3.
Aligning Bitmaps
In fact getting bitmap styles to behave properly in isometric view has been one of the major design challenges, but we are happy to report that these have (mostly) been overcome.
A little programming remains to be done, but even without it Perspectives 3 performs wonderfully in creating isometric bitmap-based maps. Doors and windows for example, just like their vector predecessors, align to angled walls by simply moving the mouse cursor over the wall baseline when placing them.
Casting Shadows
Taking a cue from City Designer 3, the Global Sun option will also create dynamic shadows and lights on the walls, allowing you to adjust these on the fly. The difference in shadows in the image on the right has been created with only a quick adjustment on the Global Sun direction.
Like in Perspectives Pro, all the these tools and styles will be available to create outdoor maps with buildings. We’ll incorporate lessons that have been learned in the Source Maps line of maps into the tools and the manual to make this even easier and quicker.
The Plan
Our plan is currently to have Perspectives 3 ready for pre-order before Christmas, and then do the full release early next year. I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I do!
