Mountain Symbols
Since I am on a roll with questions, one other question is regarding mountains. I was wondering where to get some alternative mountain designs, are they in the annuals or somewhere else. There is another style of mountain I see and would like to implement in my drawings.
Comments
- If you are using CC3+, you should have three different raster drawing styles (CC3 standard overland, Mike Schley overland and Mike Schley inks). You can open a symbol catalog from another style by clicking the open symbol catalog button and browse for it. Overland symbol catalogs are located in the Symbols\Maps\ catalog in the CC3+ data directory. In addition to the raster styles, there are also three vector styles (CC3 Overland Vector, CC3 overland vector BW and CCPro Overland)
- Symbol set 1 contains two new raster styles and two new vector styles.
- And of course the annual. There are a lot of annuals that provides new overland styles, and just about every one of those includes mountain symbols for use in that style.
Note that from that list, not all of them will go well with each other. It all depends on your base map style.
My current map that I'm working with, is 11,000 miles wide by 9,000 miles high.
If I divide 11,000 by 1,000 to get the recommended scale for symbols, I should place mountain symbols down at 11 scale.
But for my peninsulas and islands on this map, that scale is way too large - and not just for mountain symbols, but for all other symbols at 11 scale, too.
What are my options? Could I have a decent looking map at this size, and lower the scale of the symbols to, say, 6??
It depends what you're trying to accomplish, but the short answer is: yes, you will probably want to scale your symbols down on that kind of map. Possibly even lower than 6, and maybe even down to 1 (or less). It all depends on the look you're trying to achieve.
Just remember you will have to export a very large image for the symbols to look decent under those circumstances.
Do keep in mind that a world map will never be able to hold all the details of the world anyway, sometimes you must leave things out from a map at this scale, so you should ask yourself if these mountains on the peninsula would even be visible on a world-scale map. Perhaps they're better off only appearing on the regional map of that area?
Here is a map of "Europe" (actually most of Europe+North Africa+West Asia) which I found on the internet. It's about 2900 miles wide by 2200 miles high.
I opened CC3+ and created a new map in the Ancient Realms style with the same dimensions. I then inserted the bitmap of "Europe" (sloppily, but this is only an example).
Because the map is 2900 miles wide, the program defaults to a scale of 2.9 in this case. I stuck a few mountains on the map at that scale.
Not to belabor the point, but those mountains are quite simply way too big. They are of no real use on the main part of the map or anywhere else, in any capacity whatsoever. Of course you wouldn't want to try to portray every little mountain range in Europe, but surely you would want to include at least the more important ones, such as the Alps and the Pyrenees? Not with these monsters!
So then I scaled the mountains down to 1 and (roughly and sloppily, since this is just an example) placed the Pyrenees and the Alps.
Much better. At that scale you could place the important mountain ranges of Europe. At the default scale of 2.9, the symbols are simply far too large to create any ranges on this map. I love CC3/CC3+ and think the program gets a lot of unfair criticism, but one think I don't like is the preposterously huge symbols you get if you create a map larger than the default template. The only reason I don't complain more is that it's so easy to fix, and the fix is to scale the gargantuan symbols way down.
In general, I prefer not to go too far below 50% of the default scale, but that is no absolute rule either. The most important point here is to be a bit careful and not go too low. For example, with Phantom077's map above, the default symbol scale is 11. If symbol scale 1 was used instead, it would take approximately 121 mountain symbols to fill the same area. If one goes for that scale, be prepared for a lot of work placing your symbols. For some maps, this may be quite acceptable and lead to a gorgeous map, but if one is not careful, it may also end up looking very cluttered.
Great posts Phantom077 & Monsen.