World and Regional Maps
Silverwolf
Newcomer
Forgive my idiocy and general illiteracy when it comes to programs such as these ahead of time. Also if this subject has been breached before, but my search turned up nothing.
I am attempting to create a series of maps for my campaign setting and CC3 is working rather well for this, but I have one minor problem. What I want is to have one big world map then more detailed maps for continents and regions. This is going to be a lot of work, but I am stalling on exactly how to implement it. There are two methods I can think of.
One is to create the larger world map as a template only outlining cultural borders and geographical features then save it. Then taking the saved image cut out segments and load them into smaller maps then detail each one separately with appropriately scaled symbols and text. The weakness with this one is that when I zoom in closer on the map, even using the fractalise function, my coasts and borders tend to quickly look very unpleasant no matter how hard I try to detail them. They become a series of very straight lines, I suppose is what I am saying.
The other it to create each smaller map separately as a template, save them, then connect them altogether for the larger maps. The obvious weakness here is getting them all to line up appropriately. Also, it is a great deal more work.
Before I start down either path I was wondering if there might be a more simple method I am overlooking or one provided with in Campaign Cartographer itself? Or a way in the program to fix some of the problems I am mentioning. Thank you ahead of time.
I am attempting to create a series of maps for my campaign setting and CC3 is working rather well for this, but I have one minor problem. What I want is to have one big world map then more detailed maps for continents and regions. This is going to be a lot of work, but I am stalling on exactly how to implement it. There are two methods I can think of.
One is to create the larger world map as a template only outlining cultural borders and geographical features then save it. Then taking the saved image cut out segments and load them into smaller maps then detail each one separately with appropriately scaled symbols and text. The weakness with this one is that when I zoom in closer on the map, even using the fractalise function, my coasts and borders tend to quickly look very unpleasant no matter how hard I try to detail them. They become a series of very straight lines, I suppose is what I am saying.
The other it to create each smaller map separately as a template, save them, then connect them altogether for the larger maps. The obvious weakness here is getting them all to line up appropriately. Also, it is a great deal more work.
Before I start down either path I was wondering if there might be a more simple method I am overlooking or one provided with in Campaign Cartographer itself? Or a way in the program to fix some of the problems I am mentioning. Thank you ahead of time.
Comments
Be aware that your larger scale map must be less detailed than your smaller scale maps - not just for file sizes (modern computers can work with some very large files) but for simple legibility.
If you're going to work from the top down (world first, then region, area, etc) you can trim the area you want to develop, or just a part of it, to use as a guide for more details. Yes, you will have to redraw coastlines and borders in more detail.
The way I'd do it would be to choose what I wanted to carry to the new map (don't need symbols, except maybe settlement locations, do need coasts, rivers, contours, borders, roads...). Freeze all layers. Thaw the layers with stuff you want to keep. Then copy all with origin 0,0. Stuff from the frozen layers won't be copied.
Start a new map, paste everything in, at origin 0,0 and scale 1. Draw a box around the area you want to focus on, and trim the entities to it. Zoom extents to make sure you've deleted everything outside your box. If you haven't, you can use the erase tool with area select to pick up stragglers.
(Call me overcautious, but I will NOT do the cropping and trimming on a large scale map I've worked on for ages - I always do it on the new map.)
Then select everything and move. Click the endpoint of the box corner for origin, and type 0,0 for the desination. Edit properties, select everything, turn the colour something outrageous (Profantasy like purple, and most of us have picked that habit up) and move everything to a layer called temporary. These are now your guides for drawing more detailed lines.
Going from the bottom up, copy what you want, paste it into a larger scale template and redraw. You can tie several maps together with the move tool if you want, but because you're going to redraw, you don't have to make it match up perfectly.