Brand New to Map Making

Cirra · July 2008

Hi there,

I am interested in buying this product, but I would like someone to answer a few questions. Firstly, I went to a friend's house and tried it out a little. After struggling for about an hour, I became frustrated and gave up. I couldn't get the size of the map that I wanted no matter what I did.

Now, I have never used map editing before, so I really didn't know what I was doing. My friend tried to explain it to me, but I won't retain any of her instruction unless I can physically do it. So before I spend an insane amount of money on this software, can anyone tell me how difficult creating a world map is? Are there any tricks to it?

Thanks!

Monsen · July 2008

It depends a bit of your point of view. CC3 does have a certain learning curve, but doing a few tutorials is enough to get the hang of the program and make very nice maps easily.
Personally, I find it quite easy to do almost anything I need in CC3.

One of the important things to remember when learning CC3 is that this is NOT an image processing program, so don't expect to be able to do things the same way as you would in Photoshop or similar. And unless you are familiar with CAD-based program, don't expect to be able to just jump in without doing at least the basic tutorials, they are essential to understanding the software.
Once you get to know it, you'll realise that CC3 is extremely powerful, and IMHO, quite intuitive (It might not feel like this at first).

There is a free video tutorial at ProFantasy's website that shows how easy it is to build a dungeon. A similar tutorial is available for overland maps, but this is part of the Cartographer's Annual 2008, a pay product.

Also remember that ProFantasy has a satisfaction guarantee, so trying it out is risk-free.

lrellok · July 2008

I am actually having a similar problem, sort of. How the blazes do you figure out what sized map you need??? The base measure seems to be in pixels, which does me no good at all as a map maker who works in things like kilometers and miles (like 2000-3000 miles). Can some one give me a pixel to mile ratio for the new map function?

also, i am having great difficulty getting the map i have onto the program. i was told importing was easy, far from it. how do i get a map drawn onto a piece of paper into the program in the size i need it to be so that the scale of the map is the scale i want, and i do not have rivers that are 500 miles wide.

Monsen · July 2008

CC3 operates in Units, not pixels. For overland maps, one unit equals one mile (or one kilometre on metric maps). When you start a new overland map, the size you input into the box is units (= miles). Thus no conversion are required, you just input the desired size directly.
This also means that if you give input to CC3 on the command line instead of via the mouse, you always specify distances in miles. So if you are making a line, inputting 1, will give you a line one unit long (which equals one mile on an overland map). See the manual for more information on how to use the command line.
CC3 is a vector based drawing program, which means it doesn't really care much about pixels at all. These are just an artificial part of computers, not very useful in map making.

To import a hand drawn map, all you have to do is to scan it, and insert the file into CC3 using the "Draw -> Insert File". Then use the "Info -> Distance" tool to measure the distance between two points on the map to determine current scale. So if measuring in CC3 tells you it is 3 miles, but you know the distance is actually 4.5 miles, you know the scale of the image is off by 1.5 (4.5/3 = 1.5). So, all you have to do now is to scale the image by a factor of 1.5 to get it to be the correct scale. In CC3 you can even input 4.5/3 directly as a scale factor (instead of 1.5), so you don't have to calculate it yourself first.
To scale the image, you can use any of CC3's scale commands, but I prefer non-visual scale for this:
Right click on the "Scale" button, select "Non-Visual Scale". Select the image. Right click, "Do It". Type in the scale factor. Hit enter to accept the default origin. You're done.

NeonKnight · July 2008

I Also made a small tutorial for placing in scanned maps into CC3 for tracing etc.

The tutorial is hosted at Cartographer's Guild a site that talks all thing map making. We support the CC3 forums, and in turn I know the CC3 forums support us (we are listed in the big sticky at the top of the main page).

I know I posted the link here in this forum before, and it can be found in this thread here:

http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=101&page=1#Item_14

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Brand New to Map Making

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