Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread: Managing a big project in CC3

  1. #1
    Guild Applicant
    Join Date
    Jul 2013
    Location
    Upper Waiakea Forest Reserve, Hawaii Island
    Posts
    4

    Default Managing a big project in CC3

    I have an existing continental scale map in CC3 for a world building project I'm starting. I want to manage this project properly from the beginning, so I'm hoping for some advice.

    What I'd like to do is crop out areas of the existing continental map to start much more detailed regional scale maps, and then after detailing the regional maps also be able to simply copy details from one regional map to another. So, one continental map, and many regional maps, and matching coordinates between all of them all so it's easy to transfer details accurately from one map to another. (Since it's a big long-term project I'm expecting it would not be wise to do all the regional detail on a single massive continental map.)

    The coastline and rivers are a major time sink, so I don't want to have to reproduce them. I want to retain the coastlines and rivers as I crop the continental map to the regional map boundaries, and then on the regional maps I'll start by increasing the detail of the coastlines and rivers. After that I will add the rest of the details to the regional map.

    Can anyone who has done something like this in CC3 advise me on how to do it right?

  2. #2
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    The High Desert
    Posts
    3,549

    Default

    The most common suggestion is to treat CC3 as a drawing tool with some nice features for making maps. The least-frustrating path that many folks have followed is to simply save the area of interest from your world map into an image file such as a BMP, create a new local map, and paste the BMP into the background. Then use tools like the freehand drawing tool to trace over the coastlines or use the regular drawing tools to quickly redraw the local area. There are many discussions about this sort of activity both here and over at ProFantasy's own forum. I find that trying to clip arbitrary polygons (or far worse, multipolies) down to a new rectangle and then having to resize and replace all of the symbols is a lot more pain than just doing a quick redraw.

    Another important consideration for this recommendation is that what should be shown on a map varies with the scale of a map. A world-scale map, for example, won't show nearly the amount of terrain (coastline, river, mountain, etc.) detail or habitation detail (cities, towns, villages, roads, and so on) that a regional or local map will. Because you'll need to do a whole lot of rework at each level, it's often simpler to just rework everything from scratch. Small discrepancies are usually not going to be noticed and they will tend toward very small if you're doing everything roughly at once.

  3. #3
    Guild Applicant
    Join Date
    Jul 2013
    Location
    Upper Waiakea Forest Reserve, Hawaii Island
    Posts
    4

    Default

    After some more digging around I found out that there's a tutorial on making detailed submaps from a larger map in the 2012 Annuals. I only glanced at it for now, but I'll be giving that a try...
    Last edited by bkrownd; 12-09-2013 at 03:35 PM.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •