ralf | August 24, 2015 | Maps of the Month, user maps
Normally it is a little quieter in our community during the summer months, with us being at GenCon and many people on vacation or enjoying the outdoors. But this year, many amazing and beautiful new maps were posted on the ProFantasy forum. Let’s take a look at this summer’s crop – almost 30 maps in total!
Grimur used the Dungeons of Schley symbol set to draw this beautiful tavern floorplan. There’s a little bit of Photoshop post-processing involved, but nothing that could not be done in CC3+ either.
And his city map of Martell matches this style beautifully.
Finally, he used the latest Annual style by Pär Lindström for this quick local map. The paper folds add just that extra touch of awesome.
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ralf | July 3, 2015 | community, Maps of the Month, user maps
I’ve got two months of beautiful user maps to cover, since due to holidays I wasn’t able to collect them for May. So without further ado, let’s get going:
My personal highlight of this month’s collection (and the other maps are very good too I should add) is probably Mappy’s The Manticore’s Tale tavern, drawn in Mike Schley’s dungeon style. it’s just wonderfully executed.
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ralf | May 18, 2015 | community, Maps of the Month, user maps
Time flies and for a moment it seemed like yesterday that I posted the last collection of user maps from the forum. But then I look at all the beautiful new maps and think “No way they managed to do that overnight. It’s hard enough to believe these all appeared within a month.” Let’s take a look!
SteveTravis continues his awesome series of maps for the German rpg “Das Schwarze Auge”. Here are the town of Andergast, the map for an overland journey and a villain hideout.
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ralf | April 14, 2015 | community, Maps of the Month, user maps
It’s time for another look at last month’s maps on the community forum. Let’s see what the CC3 users have come up!
Look at these beautiful floorplans created with Symbol Set 4 (Mike Schley Dungeons) by SlaveOne. Check out the forum thread for even more of them. I’m especially in love with the “Lucky Hobitz Futs” tavern.
Suntzu is using CC3+ to draw maps of Harn, look at his beautiful versions of the whole of Harn and the Melderyn isle.
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ralf | March 2, 2015 | community, Maps of the Month, user maps
Another month has passed and the community forum has been busy. Let’s take a look with what our users came up last month.
Steve Travis continues his line of maps for the German DSA adventure “The Wolf of Winhall” with a map of the eponymous town.
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ralf | February 2, 2015 | Maps of the Month, user maps
We’ve been pretty busy with the CC3+ release, but so have been our users and so it’s time to showcase the user maps from the ProFantasy community forum again. We are especially delighted that we can already include some gorgeous maps created with CC3+, some of them first time efforts with our software!
For example, this is FerCanale‘s first map, the nicely frigid-looking White Wolves Island.
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ralf | November 21, 2014 | user maps
It’s been a while since we posted a round up of user maps, mostly because we are very busy with CC3+ and had the summer’s convention schedule to take care of. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been great maps posted to the forum – quite to the contrary as you can see below.
You can always rely on Grimur to take everyone’s breath away with his gorgeous maps, like this one using the Herwin Wielink overland style.
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Simon Rogers | July 3, 2014 | Annual, user maps
Whether you want a world overview, and solar system map, a starship deckplan, or a map of a star empire many light years across, we have the software for you. CC3 has limited SF facilities alone, though you can certainly do an old-style Traveller map, but Fractal Terrains, Cosmographer 3, symbol sets and Annuals, you have a much wider array.
This map is created with CC3 plus the August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013.
This sector map was created with Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for Ashen Stars.
Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for the Traveller RPG. More here.
Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3 for Ashen Stars
Cosmographer 3 calculates and shows 3D distances for star systems as in the small isometric sample.
Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3
Created with Cosmographer 3 and CC3
Top down satellite cartography with CC3 and Annual 2012.
Created by forum user Micco40 in about ten minutes using FT3 and CC3.
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ralf | June 23, 2014 | Maps of the Month, user maps
It’s high time to showcase the great maps from our user community again, since we haven’t done so since April! So without further ado, let’s take a look…
Steve Travis posted on the first maps drawn in the Dungeons of Schley style of Symbol Set 4. I love it, as well as other great maps for the “Das Schwarze Auge” game.
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ralf | March 19, 2014 | competition, user maps
We’ve asked Christian, the winner of our map-making competition, to share a few words on his map and the competition and he was so kind to oblige. Here’s what he has to say.
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A few weeks ago I was searching online for fantasy map-making contests. I wanted an assigned theme and a real deadline—something that would challenge my skills and help me generate another piece of work I could be proud of. That’s when I came across ProFantasy.com. I’d been interested in their software before, but hadn’t had a chance to use it. Now I had a chance to win it in a competition.
Make an island, they said, about three miles across. Something like a medieval treasure map. The contest had been open for months, but was closing in just a few days. I took a look at the submissions that had been sent in thus far, decided I had a shot at winning, and threw myself into it.
I worked feverishly, right up to the deadline, and actually ran out of time to put absolutely everything I wanted into the map. That’s why there’s no border around it, and no compass rose… But what I did manage to produce followed my vision. As a novelist and dungeon master, I knew I could create some storytelling elements that would hook into the drawing. Some secrets and clues that would only be available to those who looked closely, and a narrative that would marry the image to the text. I had an aesthetic that I’d been developing for maps for my novels, inspired by some of the top fantasy cartographers online. I’m passionate about making beautiful illustrations, and I’m excited to be learning new techniques every day.
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As for the hands-on process itself, virtually all of this map was hand-drawn in ProCreate on an iPad 3 using an Adonit Touch stylus. There are a few “pattern brushes” in that app which help with things like the the jungle trees and the ocean waves, but everything else was the result of pushing pixels manually. The shape of the island and mountains isn’t based on anything other than doodling with the idea of a vaguely volcanic tropical island in mind.
The cloister overhead plan was laid out in Adobe Illustrator. It’s far larger, sharper, and more detailed in the original file, with many upper floors and basement dungeon levels. The “3D” isometric extrusion of the cloister is actually just faux-3D, a technique I use in Illustrator where I take the overhead plan and rotate, squash, duplicate and move by a certain amount, and then blend. I took a screen shot of that and traced over it in ProCreate.
The last step was to bring it all into Adobe Photoshop. I had created a “parchment background” from some rendered clouds and a bunch of filters, so I laid out the various pieces on that background and added the text elements. Then I did save-for-web and picked settings that looked good but kept the resulting file under 2 MB.
The cloister itself is about 300 feet on one axis, making the hypotenuse around 500 feet. Since you can line up 30 of the little cloister images end to end and have them stretch from one side of the island to the other, the island winds up being about 3 miles across.
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