How to export properly

OodSigma13

Hello, I recently purchase CC3+ and am new to mapping in general. I have done some things in Photoshop, but I wanted to try a software that was made for mapping, especially for fantasy worlds. I redesigned a map from my current D&D game and wanted to export it to show to the DM so he could let me know what he wanted, but every time I export, the file is of such poor quality. I need the ability to zoom in a bit as its a map of the continent and nation on it.

I have tried many of the image exports and even changed the options, but is so much different from what I am used to. I can zoom in real nice on the map in CC3+, but I cant get that quality in the export. Any suggestions?

JimP

You can't zoom into a graphic file. I use pings as the export graphic.

You can draw a regional.map. Then draw a town map.

But you cannot draw a region map and zoom down to town level.

But you can, within the fcw map file, link a town map to the region fcw map file. It's called hyperlinking.

On my cell. Hopefully autocorrect didn't change my text.

Loopysue

For a complete map export I quite often set my options up like this and use a simple "JPEG Bitmap file" save as type (or PNG if size doesn't matter).

These settings have the effect of cropping the image to the map border in both directions, so even though both have 4000 px available only the longest side of the image will be 4000 px long. The shortest side will be whatever length it needs to be to cover the whole map.

If you want an even larger export of the whole thing just increase upwards of 4000 in both those top boxes. The only thing you need to be careful with is that you don't exceed 10,000 px in both dimensions where it says "work size" at the bottom. The current rendering machine doesn't do very well after that size. In case you are wondering why its bigger than the size you set as the export size above, that's because I have antialiasing switched on, which makes CC3 generate an initial map that is large enough to crunch down to the size you want as part of the antialiasing operation. So to get a map 8000 px on the long side you might need to significantly reduce the aa down to about 20%.

[Image_14996]

Having exported a single large image like that I might use GIMP to cut a piece out of it as an extract of the map.

But if I wanted to export just a small area at 4000 px on the long side I would use the same setup, only I'd export one of the Rectangular section types, where I can pick the opposite corners of a rectangle around the bit that I want.