Might as well register. Besides, I have a few questions. Might as well ask for help with them.

Though I have done a lot of stuff with Adobe products and Maya and a few of its cousins, I have never really put much thought into cartography. I really am amazed at what seems to be a huge cartography following as well as many useful programs. During the last few days of my lurking I have binged on Campaign Cartography 3, watching tutorial videos and tried to learn the program and anything else I could learn about cartography. Yesterday alone I must have spent about 12 hours strait on it.

As far as what I think about CC3 so far, I really like the potential of what a finished map can look like and all the tools available to build it, but drawbacks I see are that, one, even with a fast computer the program can sometimes operate at a snails pace, and two, the navigation controls as I understand them so far are not as nice as they should be. I think that every program that can zoom should let you use the middle mouse wheel button to do so and a hot key pan tool should be available as well (similar to Photoshop's hand tool). The last drawback is that you can't set custom hot keys, not that I see anyway and you have to use your mouse to do all the work.

My interest in cartography comes from my interest in writing. There are some fantasy stories I want to write, but I am having trouble trying to imagine in my head how things are happening. I believe if I could create maps of the areas in question that I wouldn't have so many idea disruptions and could continue on with my work more frequently.

Well, I guess that is the end of my introduction. Now for those questions...