God, what a newb...
Hello mapmakers,
I'm totally green with CC3 and hope that it will help me with the design of my high-fantasy wargame that combines my favorite elements of Magic: The Gathering, Divine Right, and Demonlord. I've greatly benefitted from Monsen's YouTube tutorials in learning CC3's basic functions. What I need now is a sort of style guide that answers the following questions:
- Is there any particular sequence recommended for "laying down" terrain?
- How about tips for laying down trees and mountains, particularly bunches vs. individuals?
- Suggestions for the myriad of issues that I'm too green even to think of yet?
Comments
Hi McCrakan :)
There is a favoured basic order of doing things which can be modified to suit individual preferences. It might be a good idea to work through the example in the CC3+ manual (written by Remy Monsen) to get a practical feel of everything, but basically its:
Everything has it's own designated sheet, so even if rivers are normally drawn before the terrain textures are laid down the textures will end up underneath the rivers.
There are drawing tools for placing whole forests available in most styles which fall into 2 categories. There's the super dense forest fills and the more scattered result of using a drawing tool based on a Symbols in Area macro. These are easy to tell apart from the thumbnail image in the drawing tool list. There are also drawing tools available for placing mountain chains, though these are mostly in the Mike Schley Overland style and may even be only available in an annual issue (I can't remember now off the top of my head). Speaking of Annuals they are also a great way to learn since every issue of an annual that is a new mapping style (not all issues are new mapping styles) comes with it's own mapping guide. Here is a wall of links to the individual annual issues. The annuals are sold in bundles of years, so if you want one in particular you need that year's annual.
As for suggestions and solutions for issues you might find along the way, that is what the forum and the Facebook Group are for. There are lots of people (most of the real experts are here on the forum) who enjoy helping to solve these things.
Thank you so much, Loopysue! I want so much to get to building my world, but I'm forcing myself to slow down--even Rome wasn't built in a day....
I just splurged on the Tome of Ultimate Mapping, which seems to be just the style guide that I need. Again, it'll take me forever to work my way thru it, but I want to do this right.
If you're like everyone else here, you're going to make mistakes. Lots of mistakes. And learn new things. Lots of new things. Expect that those will combine to get you to make lots of maps, each one a little better than the one before. You may remake the same map quite a few times, but keep the older ones around so that you have perspective on how you've improved!
Indeed. I have made thousands of maps over the past 23 years. My newer ones look better.