My First Map

Hey guys im new here!

I got CC3 for christmas (JOY!) and i whipped up my first map. It is a smaller section of a much larger continent. The few kingdoms are small citystates that make up a larger kingdom. Hope u enjoy!

Ps. I know little about cc3 so any tips or advice would be nice ;)

oops after looking at it i realize that you cant zoom in. *pout* :(

For a first map, this is very, very good. Gotta love CC3 :P

You should get some fantasy fonts I think and put effects on them (like a glow). Some of the labels aren't readable right now, so you might want to increase the font size. Also you have put in a lot of different symbols, which together with the size of the map and grid make the result look a bit cluttered.

But really, a very good first map. If you do any other maps share them with us, please!

Yeh i agree u can usualy see the labels when its zoomed in (my group uses the viewer and a laptop, we dont print them out) but it would look WAY better with sum fonts. Also, if anyone knows how to make the map larger without zooming in that would be nice (i have it set on 1000x800). I dont know how to put in the effects so yeh i need sum help with that,

I think it's quite good for a first attempt with never before used software.

Be sure to drop a post in the Introduction thread.

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Originally Posted by eoinmorgan

Yeh i agree u can usualy see the labels when its zoomed in (my group uses the viewer and a laptop, we dont print them out) but it would look WAY better with sum fonts. Also, if anyone knows how to make the map larger without zooming in that would be nice (i have it set on 1000x800). I dont know how to put in the effects so yeh i need sum help with that,

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I am on my laptop right now and I don't have CC3 installed. But there is a button "Effects" or "Sheet effects" or something in the left navigation bar. When you click on it a window will appear where you can add effects to each sheet. This allows you for example to create a sheet with rivers and add specific effects to them. When you want to turn on the effects you can check a box which says "Turn on sheet effects" or something and your map will reload with the effects. The might make the software lag a bit, depending on your computer, number of items on the map and effects.

CC3 comes with some standard effects, glow effects to the text for example, so you can give it a try right from the start, without altering something...

Oh, and about saving your map at a bigger size: hopefully someone else can answer that. I am used to making screenshots of my maps and pasting them together (I do mostly cities at the moment and the bigger maps make CC3 crash because my computer doesn't have enough memory).

I don't have CC3 handy at the moment, but somewhere in the save dialogues, there is a place where you can set the resolution for raster images (jpeg, png, bmp...) That resolution doesn't have to match the dimensions of the map, so you can bump them way up. It does take longer for CC3 to render the map, though. I exported my Vendria map at about 2400 X 1800, and it took something like 10 minutes to export. It had lots of effects on it, though.

If you want to export only a portion of the map, you can type wbs into the command line, specify the upper-left and lower-right corners of the area to export, and that area of the map will be saved out at the resolution you have set in the save preferences. I found that very handy when I wanted to provide a detailed view of whatever I was working on at the time.

edit: Very nice use of the icons--the bow in the forest and the crown above Gaveroth. The wave symbols are also well done--I never cared for them on my maps, but they look good here. Maybe I was just trying to use too many. You may want to move the Northern-most wave away from the scale bar, though. It's obscuring the '0.' Come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea to explode the scale bar and change the text color to something that will contrast better with the ocean texture--the black on dark blue is getting lost. Though perhaps it isn't so bad at the proper viewing size.

Nice. Beats anything I've ever done.

Thanks guys! All of these are great tips! I found the effects section, so I will be fiddling around with that :) At proper size, i can zoom to see the labels very easily, but i accidentaly put some of them in gray :roll:, such as the ones on the mountains...

Anyway, Imma keep this map as is for the memories, and start again on a fresh canvas so that i can try out these new ideas.

Thanks for the help!

Sort of blows the whole CC3 is hard to learn thing! This is great. I like. :D