CC3 Continental Map: The Northlands

[ravells]

Yes it does quite nicely. It even has configuration and calibration commands, and commands to turn it on and off within the program.

Caveat: I haven't used a tablet with CC3 yet, but I used to borrow the Wacom at my old job and have used it with CC2 Pro.

Thanks! I have CC2 Pro (although I haven't used it for awhile) and will give it a try with the tablet. Apologies for threadjacking.

Midgardsormr, I really like the way your map is going and am looking forward to seeing more. For C&Cs jaerdaph has said pretty much everything I was thinking and more, so no further comments from me.

[jaerdaph]

ravells: glad to be of help - just go to CC2 Help and search on "tablet" and you should find more info about getting started.

Midgardsormr: Your map is looking very nice. The color scheme works great, and the hand drawn symbols look nice on the creme colored landmass.

For rivers, I have two suggestions: One thing you could do is redraw the landmass so that the rivers are cut into it. That way the ocean background will show through and everything will be uniform. You'd have to cut out the lakes too rather than draw lakes. Otherwise, if you like the rivers you have now (which look good as is), You can always change the line width of the river after you draw it. *Right* click on the Change Properties button on the left side, select Change Line Width from the pull down menu that shows up, select the river(s), right click and select Do It, then type in a new width (try 0.5 first) and hit the Enter key. Zoom in and out to see how the river looks up close and at full zoom, then change the line width again if you wish to try something else. The default CC2 Pro style line width on the river drawing tool is 0, which looks the same up close and far away.

Keep up the good work.

[Midgardsormr]

Thanks for the pointer about right clicking on Change Properties. That's been quite useful!

I still have not discovered a way to get rid of that beveled edge on the landmass. It's not bugging me so much now, but I know when I make the political version of this map it will.

Also, is there a way to cut a hole out of the center of an object? I liked your suggestion of cutting the rivers and lakes out of the landmass to let the ocean show through, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without pulling points from the coast. I tried using Trim Inside, but that did not work.

Instead, I changed the line width and found out that I could add a fill to a line that has a width greater than 0. I think I am going to move the rivers onto a different sheet, though, since the glow has turned them black.

One further question: is there a way to save a view of the map with a different zoom level? When I start doing detail work, it would be nice to be able to show just the areas I am working on rather than the entire map.

[jaerdaph]

Thanks for the pointer about right clicking on Change Properties. That's been quite useful!

Awesome - right clicking on a lot of the buttons in CC3 opens up whole new possibilities.

I still have not discovered a way to get rid of that beveled edge on the landmass. It's not bugging me so much now, but I know when I make the political version of this map it will.

Are you using the default sheet effects from the map template or are these effects you added? What you can do (either way) is left click the Sheets and Effects button, check Activate Sheets, select the sheet with the bevel effect on it on the left side of the box, uncheck the effect on the bottom right side of the box that you don't want to see on your political map, then hit OK. That lets you turn off individual effects on a sheet without turning off all effects on that sheet or all effects on all sheets in the drawing. Of course if you don't want it at all you can just delete the effect from the list. It only will get deleted in the current map and not on any other maps you might want to create later.

Also, is there a way to cut a hole out of the center of an object? I liked your suggestion of cutting the rivers and lakes out of the landmass to let the ocean show through, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without pulling points from the coast.

There is a (somewhat involved) technique called multipoly to cut a hole in something, but thinking about it more, you really don't need to do that. If you have a lake that doesn't connect to a river or the ocean, just draw it as you did before. If you have a lake with river that doesn't touch the ocean, again draw it the same way as a single poly with the river protruding out. Rivers and lakes that eventually go to the sea would be part of the landmass outline with the river jutting into the interior of the poly up and around and back down to the outer coast again.

One further question: is there a way to save a view of the map with a different zoom level? When I start doing detail work, it would be nice to be able to show just the areas I am working on rather than the entire map.

There are a series of Zoom/View navigation buttons in the upper right corner of CC3. You can zoom in, out, zoom extents, go back to your last view etc. They work independently of other commands, so you can actually be in the middle of a drawing command, select one of those to zoom where you want, then go back to the drawing to finish the command you were working on. Play around with them on your map or an example map (you can't really hurt anything with them) because it is the best way to learn. The buttons look like magnifying glasses.

[Midgardsormr]

The zoom controls are no problem. I was just wondering if I could output a jpg of a zoomed-in area. I suppose I could use Print Screen, but I'd feel compelled to take it into PhotoPaint to crop out the interface.

Concerning that bevel: I am using the default effects, plus a dark glow on the coastline. Per your advice, I started turning things off to see their what they were doing; the bevel was caused by the Spatial Matrix Processing. A little obnoxious to have something like that on by default, but I can deal. Is there a tutorial anywhere that details how to use that effect? The help file is a little obtuse in that area.

Next step is to lay in the roads and cities. Roads are easy, but for the cities I'm going to try to define some of my own symbols, just so I can muck around in a new part of the software. I'm starting to get the hang of things, I think.

[NeonKnight]

I love the map, but.....(it's not a huge But, I'm currently sitting on it ), I try to steer clear of the Fill Styles. The are nice for quick and drity, but if you look on your map, and it is a beautiful map, the fill style gets 'cut off', so you have mountians at the top of the fill style with no peaks.

The other think is, Fill Styles have definite descernable pattern to them, something when I make my own maps I am able to keep clear of by changing up the symbols, their positions etc.

Other than this one, small critique, I likey very, very much!

[jaerdaph]

The zoom controls are no problem. I was just wondering if I could output a jpg of a zoomed-in area. I suppose I could use Print Screen, but I'd feel compelled to take it into PhotoPaint to crop out the interface.

Ah, gotcha. Here's what I do to get PNGs, JPGs or BMPs out of CC3, be it the full map or just sections of it. At the command prompt, type this command: wbs. wbs will ask you for a first corner (click on it in the map or type in a coordinate), then it will ask you for the opposite corner, (again click on it or type in a coordinate), and then a Save Bitmap Section box will pop up. Select the file type you want to save as (PNG, BMP or JPG), give the file a name and click save. If you have Snap on, that will work with wbs if you want a little more percision control when selecting the corners. If you need to change the output settings of the JPG/BMP/PNG file, go to the Tools menu, Options... and click on the BMP, JPEG, PNG button and you can do it from there.

Concerning that bevel: I am using the default effects, plus a dark glow on the coastline. Per your advice, I started turning things off to see their what they were doing; the bevel was caused by the Spatial Matrix Processing. A little obnoxious to have something like that on by default, but I can deal. Is there a tutorial anywhere that details how to use that effect? The help file is a little obtuse in that area.

Yeah, a lot of the templates and template wizards have default settings for the sheet effects that assume you are just using the standard symbol set/style/drawing tools in CC3. Since you are effectively creating your own style, the settings might not be right for that. I'd love to see Profantasy add an option to add or not add pre-set sheet effects in templates you create with the wizards. There isn't really a lot of help available yet for the different sheet effects yet. What I do know I've learned from the CC user mailing list and from experimentation, trial and error. I have to admit that Spatial Matrix Processing is a bit of a mystery to me.

Next step is to lay in the roads and cities. Roads are easy, but for the cities I'm going to try to define some of my own symbols, just so I can muck around in a new part of the software. I'm starting to get the hang of things, I think.

That's very good! It gets to be very addictive after awhile, especially when you are learning new things the software can do and master things.

I also want to suggest that you try placing symbols for the forests and mountains rather than relying on the fills to do so. While it is a little more time consuming, I think you might be happier with the results.