Making real world maps
Does Campaign Cartographer have real (i.e. not fantasy) map data for all continents, mountain chains etc. included... or as a separate product? Or where would go for this? And what formats can you import it into CC?
My goal is to make a naval game on WWII but I want nice looking continents in between. Buying bitmap "clip art" for the world's land area is more expensive than just buy CC. Thanks!
PS I got interested in CC when I saw what a CC owner did to copy the style of 1 of my D-Day maps (see http://www.g-design.us/cd/DDay9815.gif a picture of the whole 10-map series) that he threw together in a "few hours". I started in 1997 with Adobe Illustrator and learning as I went, took dozens of hours each! So I am very impressed.
My goal is to make a naval game on WWII but I want nice looking continents in between. Buying bitmap "clip art" for the world's land area is more expensive than just buy CC. Thanks!
PS I got interested in CC when I saw what a CC owner did to copy the style of 1 of my D-Day maps (see http://www.g-design.us/cd/DDay9815.gif a picture of the whole 10-map series) that he threw together in a "few hours". I started in 1997 with Adobe Illustrator and learning as I went, took dozens of hours each! So I am very impressed.
Comments
Of course, you can always insert a world picture (bmp, jpg, png...) in CC3 and trace over...
Very great map, by the way.
Would the final product be vector based with shaded 'mountain areas'* some how or if bitmap have enough ppi to be output at a large size like 35x44" with 240 ppi? (yes, a large file!)
*I have lots of old, very flat illustrator clip art where the plains are green, mountains brown etc. But I'm looking for 'bumps' for mountains!
First pic is a png export from FT. Second is the FT export to CC3 and converted in a jpeg.
Here is what it can look like:
page
I also kept creating randmo worlds and until I got something I liked, and turned it into an island using the same basic method. I took the bmp, and imported it into CC3. Drew rectangles on it to match the size of my other surface maps, i.e. 185x234 miles. Exported rentangular areas for each map. Imported them into CC3 one at a time. Drew the maps for each rectangle.
World All 5 scroll down to Row M. That island is the result.
Do I need Campaign Cartographer also? Or if all I want is the world, Fractal Terrain is enough.
I downloaded the demo but found that it does not have the real world data so my testing so far have been fiddling with colors that look right.
Can one draw lines of sea areas in FT? Or must I import into Illustrator (a screen image bit map version actually if not vectors)?
Thanks Joachim and Jim!
You may be able to place lines on the map using overlays (External files shown on top of the world), but I don't know how easy it will be to get something to fit properly, if at all possible.
Exporting a bitmap from FT to be used by a program like Illustrator is no problem though (Note that FT is NOT based on vectors as CC3 is, it's only ability to handle vectors is when exporting a vector map for CC3 use)
Oh, the content was already there. Some of us have had this conversation before.
To show my 'very basic' progress from FT map to CC3 maps, I put this page back up on my site.
Ideas on World All 5 map, Row M, etc
There are 14 World All map pages on my site, note that some are mostly Ocean. Anyone can use any map I have map, but please link back to, or mention to your players, the site you got it from.
Note that there are a number of areas on my surface maps for which no maps exist. Dank Forest, Trilolara, and Dwarf Home are detailed. Gashtra has some detail. With a few other places with some minor detail. The rest are just large surface map areas with no detail.
This page: text page for surface map links links to all of the surface maps I have drawn. And link that has (D) on it has 'detail' from 1 to 2 sentences to towns with NPCs, paragrapghs of info, etc.
There is a World All page, but I do think anyone on dial-up should avoid it.
Hope that helps. And thank you for the compliments.
1. Fractal Terrain can import data of the real world and tweak its colors/shading.
2. Campaign Cartographer is designed to flesh out segments of the world. As such it imports a vector image from FT.
3. One could instead export a very large, detailed bitmap of the finished world as the bottom layer in Illustrator... and add sea area boundaries, text and game info.
4. To get at the real world data, I need to buy the CD-inclusive boxed edition rather than download either the demo or full version.
And again, I marvel at how far personal campaign mapping has come from our little brown inked bumpy paper maps of the Wilderlands!
If it's the whole world you want, it's fairly good.
@Bill Owen Well as someone who loved and still has all the maps on the little brown inked bumpy paper maps of the Wilderlands. (yes I've been around for a VERY long time in the gaming world) I loved those maps. They feel and look better than any maps Ive had ever. I'm actually trying to redo all the Wilderlands maps to make them look better and more like real fantasy maps (mainly removing the fact that they follow the hexes... that needs to change. ) I think that getting the whole wilderlands into CC3 would be a hell of a great thing to do.
Annual 8 (2014) issue 92, has something that would interest you - Real World vector data.