So you are all going to laugh at me.....

Nelson SIward

But I love CC3, and I've bought pretty much everything (Save for the 2017 cartographer's annual), and I've made some really great maps for personal use in Roll20 games. People are always wowed at the quality of the art, and even though I've spent a week's salary on this, every penny's been well spent.

I love CC3 so much, in fact, that when I accepted a challenge to change art style to 32x32 pixel 16-bit video game pixel art for mapping, I got insanely frustrated working with pixel art mapping programs like Tiled, and would much rather use CC3 and maintain the video gamey look.

Problem is, all the art styles I have accsess too are just too damn high quality! I found lots of great video gamey assets, and tried importing as fill styles, but even tinkering with the settings i'm aware of (i'm sure there's settings i'm not aware of!) the resolution was about 100x too good.

I need to, basically, do this:
Create a map style template
with fill styles made out of 32x32 pixel textures
with a catalouge of imported 32x32 pixel base objects (some are mult-tile, so can be as big as 128x128)
and have the output be extremey low resolution, to where 5 feet = 32 pixels

I can't seem to figure out where to start here. Any advice? (i have the textures already, allt he assets i got from creative commons outlets like opengameart.com)

Nelson SIward

ammendment: I mainly want to set this up for city level and site/dungeon level stuff (dungeon designer template would work just fine)
As far as campaign-level, its simple enough I can use tiled for it.

Thanks! :)

Monsen

Working with pixels isn't really CC3's strong suit, since all measurement are based on map units, pixels are really just a consideration when exporting. But here is what I would do to give this a try

- Start with a reasonably empty template.
- Import fill styles (Tools -> Import bitmap fill styles). Do NOT check the 'create other resolutions' option. Enable scaled, and set it to 5. This should make the 32x32 texture fill 5 map units.
- Import your symbols (Symbols -> Import png's). Again, DON'T create other resolutions. Set the Highest resolution to 32 pixels per drawing unit.
- After importing the symbols, open the symbol manager, select all the symbols, hit the scale button, and scale them all by 5
- Now, you can either use the symbols directly from the map (By clicking the 'symbols in map button' on top of the symbol catalog, or saving them in a separate symbol catalog from symbol manager (select them and 'save as catalog'))

- When exporting, figure out exactly how large the area you export is (I recommend using rectangular PNG exports) and input the export size (height and width) as map size divided by 5 multiplied by 32

Nelson SIward

I was worried about that, y'know round peg square hole issue. Maybe I should try a new plan... try to find cc3 assets that look really cartoony? I'll give this a try, but it sounds like this is going to be more of a struggle than using tiled for it, and ultimately I like the CAD type of map drawing, so I'll probably just back up and try doing cartoony looking assets that work well with cc3.

Thanks for the roadmap, ill let you know how it turns out.

JimP

There is an overland annual that is Issue 78, Comic Book Maps.