A few people have asked about how to make cities etc in CC3 with CD2 so I figure I'd do a small tutorial on how I do things.

So first off where do we start.. For this map we are just going to use the standard basic template and then do some changes as we go to make it look a bit better, ie add some shadow effects and generally get things to look just a little nicer then normal. So with a nice new blank CC3 document go to:

File, New.

When it ask's you what you wish to do tell it that you want to create a new city from a template and just select the 1000' x 800' template. This will give us a nice size for a 'small' village.

You should now have the following image:



Now, the first thing I generally do is some basic sheet set up and changes and the such to make things a bit easier for me to work with later.

So click on the sheets button on the side and have it bring up the sheets control panel, then add the following sheets:

STRUCTURES TALL
WALLS
WALLS LOW

Generally I put these sheets so they look like this:



ok with that done hit ok and go back to the map itself, so far we have a grey background a bunch of sheets and a border not the greatest looking map right? Now most of the time I have a rough Idea for what I'm going to make in the case of this village I did the following quick scetch in photoshop just to give an idea.. you don't have to have anything fancy, but having 'something' always helps.. Even if it's just looking at some old images or even modern ones.



Now as you can see that's fairly 'rough' but it gives you a few starting points.. You can see the dike on the left, the roads.. the river and a few prominante buildings. So now we need to bring this into CC3. I generally start with roads or rivers, there are two reasons for this.

1. Everything else is basically done around the roads or the rivers.
2. It lets me check things against my maps easier.

However you can do land features first and there are times when this is a good idea especially when you have a large amount of hills and other items. In this map we are going to start with the river as it's the only major land feature. So what do we do?

First off click on your drawing tools it's the small button that looks like this:



it will then bring up the following screen:



Now scroll down and click on water, you will be taken back to the main screen with the tool selected and the Sheet should now be set to water and layer to Water/Rivers.

Now we want to draw in the river looking at the rough image we did we know it runs down the right and isn't that thick this is what mine looks like once I've drawn it in.



Now we can start with the roads. we need these in so we can do the next sections.. You have a few options when it comes to roads I tend to just use the default road for most maps.. which works out to be 10' wide. which is about right for most non major roads.. this is what my map looks like after I've draw in the roads.



Ok with the roads in we can start with the buildings which I will continue in the next post as I have to go for now.