map outlines
I have used CC3 for many years to make maps for a long running Napoleonic campaign in Germany and Spain.
The campaign is designed to provide interesting wargames. All of the maps are designed from the wargames table up. On the tactical maps each square is a wargames table scenic square. On the strategic maps each square is a wargames table.
The maps work really well, but do not look very realistic. This is mostly because I am not very skilfull at drawing coast outlines.
If I could transfer an outline of Europe into CC3 this would solve my problem.
Is this possible?
If so how?
regards
Paul
The campaign is designed to provide interesting wargames. All of the maps are designed from the wargames table up. On the tactical maps each square is a wargames table scenic square. On the strategic maps each square is a wargames table.
The maps work really well, but do not look very realistic. This is mostly because I am not very skilfull at drawing coast outlines.
If I could transfer an outline of Europe into CC3 this would solve my problem.
Is this possible?
If so how?
regards
Paul
Comments
There are a couple of europe maps in the gallery.
You can use a real-world dataset with Fractal Terrains 3 and export the coastline from there
The World War II Interactive Atlas contains various Europe maps.
The Cartographer's Annual 2012 contains an issue with Real World maps.
You could also just import a real map as an image, and trace over it in CC3.
But I only need Germany, Italy and Spain
Is it possible to "cut and past" a section the whole map?
regards
Paul
Also since you mentioned a Napoleonic campaign on of the Annuals dealt with Napoleonic Battle Maps which may be of some interest to you.
and traced it:
So it's not that tough!
That is exactly what I am looking for.
Can I do that with CC3 or do I have to get CC3+?
Where did you get the original image from?
I just found a random map of Europe with a quick Google image search, and cropped it to the area you specified. I'm sure you can find a much better example. Good luck!
Thanks for the reference. I have downloaded the CC3 Essentials and read page 34-35. Unfortunately it does not make much sense to me. Although I have used CC3 for quite a few years, I have never mastered it. I just draw simple maps.
My requirement for an outline map of europe is a "one off". What I would really like to do is just copy the one you have shown above.
Could you give me simple instructions of how I can copy it from this forum please?
When I get home this evening, I'll make something similar in CC3 this evening and post the FCW file for you. Then you can open it in CC3 and add whatever you want to it. I'll do this as a favor even though I strongly believe you would benefit more from learning to do it yourself!
What style do you want it in? I have CC3, SS1, and all the annuals, so any style in any of those is fine. It will need to be one you have yourself to work for you.
Thanks for the offer. I need to be able to use it in CC3 so that I can put on towns and perhaps rivers.
I have CC3, but not sure what SS1 is.
Not sure about style, it looks fine above.
I am sure that you are right that it would be better if I learned how to do it myself. However I doubt that I could do so.
Many thanks for your help
CC3 is a powerful program and it can be intimidating when viewed as a whole, but the User Manual tutorials walk you through it bit by bit. Each tuturial is a nicely-manageable chunk that builds on the ones before it. You can have fun, make some nice maps, and not even realize you're learning! Win-win!
Typically, the User Manual is installed when you install CC3. You should be able to click Help and select User Manual from the menu. If not, you can download it from the same place you downloaded the Essentials guide.
~Dogtag
And the save file you can open with CC3:
Western Europe
Enjoy!
Thanks very much for the map, it is just what I was looking for.
Its kind of you to take the trouble.
Having read your, and other, comments here on the forum I feel quite guilty that I have not mastered Profantasy enough to be able to do this type of task myself. It is not being lazy, its just that I find it very difficult to understand complicated written instructions.
When I first received Profantasy I did try to read and understand the instruction booklet. To be honest I found it very complicated and difficult to understand. For me it was like a novice reading a car maintance book.
The problem, again for me, is that you have to master so much background beore you can actually do things. My salvation was finding a You Tube which explained getting started.
I am very pleased with Profantasy, and it has greatly improved my campaign maps. But the maps are a means to an end, not the end itself.
I appreciate that to those who have mastered the programme it may seem very easy. But I doubt if I am the only one who has failed to grasp more than the basics.
Thanks again for your help
Plus, even if you have been using the software for along time it is easy to forget how to do stuff on it.
I usually have to go through the basic tutorials about once a year as I often forget how to do something simple with the program.
Have you had chance to check out the various tutorial videos on youtube. I found watching Joseph Sweeney's videos much better than the manual to help in leaning to use the program than the manual.
(If you DO decide to learn more about using CC3, I definitely agree that you should watch the tutorial videos. SEEING the program in action is much more useful than reading about it, in my opinion.)
I would very much like to be able to do more things with ProFantasy.
In particular I would like to be able to transfer more maps from the internet
I did read "The way to do this is explained in the "CC3 Essentials" pdf on page 34-35 (under "Tracing Existing Paper Maps")" as recommended by Blackadder3, but it did not make much sense. It seemed that I needed to know a lot more about CC3 before I could start doing what I actually wanted to do.
Can anyone direct me to where I should start to make a map similar to the one Blackadder3 was kind enough to do for me.
Perhaps if I could just follow the steps he took it would make more sense
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=10196
http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=2321
http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=4995
The CC3 Essentials when I first started to try and learn to use CC3 got confusing in some places when I first read it years ago. I ended up hardly touching CC3 for several months due to getting frustrated in trying to learn how to use it, didn't get into using it mostly until the Joseph Sweeney tutorials. The full user manual is easier to follow and so is the Tome of Ultimate Mapping.
Thanks for the links. I will certainly check them out and see if I can do a trace
Like you I was also confused when I first received CC3. I found a couple of youtube tutorials which got me started.
Since then I have used it a lot, and work on campaign maps most weeks.
But, as with my computer, I only do the things I learned at the start
My knowledge has not progressed.
For example I constantly make new maps, rather than try to cut and paste existing maps
I am not even sure if you can do such a thing.
But because I can make a new map in about an hour, I do so rather than try to cut and paste
But comments on here have made me think again.
I am not at all sure that I will be able to master CC3, which I do find very difficult to understand
But at least I will give it a try.
Thanks for your offer
I will take you up on it if I find that I am completely stuck
I've a similar problem to thistlebarrow. I've got a 28-year fantasy campaign with a world map I got on 6 hex mapping sheets (the artwork is marvelous... a true shame it wasn't on white paper and was only partially complete... the original artist, whoever he/she was, had real talent... I got it 2nd hand from someone who'd got it at a rummage sale!) was meant to be an extension of and was done in the style of the original World of Greyhawk maps from TSR.
I've used this map because, incomplete as it is, it was nicer than anything I've ever hand drawn. It provided me with a unique map and that has served me for these 3 decades (along with a lot of players).
However, that said, I've always wanted a nice, complete digital map which I could hyperlink to and create drill downs and so on. I'm going to give it another try. I've got a fairly massive BMP (I can upscale it as needed) with the 6 pages stitched to use as a basis.
The two things that always caused me grief in getting started:
a) Tracing. The coastline is long, there are multiple continents, the coasts are not bland curves but have a fair amount of detail, and tracing using a mouse seems pretty imprecise. I think some artists use a CAD drafting tablet. I've never been able to afford one of those or a Bamboo-style tablet to make the point digitization easier for the path of the coastline.
Question1: I'd love to know if there is a way to do a bunch of partial traces of a coastline and then join them to define and overall coastline within the software?
b) The scaling. The existing product comes with a hex grid @ 10 leagues (30 miles) to a hex. I want to preserve that but trying to get a hex grid in the software to be the same size and orientation to match the scale of my image with 30 miles in CC2/3's view of things has proven tough. I'd settle for not a complete alignment as long as the hex sizes were right.... (I think either the scan has a slight distortion or the original hexes were not as entirely symetric as one might wish and the alignment in the scans may not be perfect either)
Anyway, I've thought of starting my own help topic but I wanted to drop in and say thanks for what was posted here that is already some help to me.
And I hope our maps and games go great, thistlebarrrow.
b) You should be able to set up hex grids of any size in CC3, but obviously, they have to be regular. To line them better up with the original grid, you may wish to position it manually using the Set Points button in the grid dialog, instead of filling the whole map.
Take a picture, reduce it as far as you can (gray-scale, remove everything you don't need).
Now take this image into Inkscape and convert it to a path (Path menu and select Trace Bitmap).
After this save the image as dxf, Inkscape is capable of doing this.
This fileformat can be imported into CampaingCartographer.
The results looks like the image below.
Now you can join the paths, clean up what is too much in the image and scale it as you like.
One: That my CC3's (CC2 at the time) scale matched that of my paper map scan. That is to say that a the distance represented by the width side-to-side of a hex on the paper map is supposed to be 30 miles in map scale, so I wanted this distance scale preserved (hexes or no on the new map) so that the in-world distances remained and were not suddenly inconsistent with 28 years of game experience.
I suspect getting this right has to do with:
The height and width of the scan in pixels and its pixel resolution.
The height and width of my map and its pixel resolution. (although perhaps this distance would be expressed differently)
The notion is that with the same pixel density per inch, a certain distance defined as 30 miles on the paper map would correspond to that in the map scale.
THIS was probably what I was struggling with - the trouble getting the hex grid overtop may have been the way this issue manifested.
I don't care if the hex alignment is different or even if I have no hex overlay layer at all on the new map. What I care about is that the distance from landmark A to landmark B on my paper map (in miles) remains the same in my electronic map and that the map is scaled and configured in such a way as to make that true.
Does that make sense?
I'm using GIMP to clean up the map to create a clear continent/water border (removing all the water and replacing with oxydol white!.
I'm also using GIMP's spray paint function with a mid-range opacity set for a 'back' paint to do a quick colour in of hexes that were never finished in the original map. Now, that method does (even done as I have) require some care to not block out hexlines or terrain features while still giving some decent colour to the hexes. It wouldn't be a display version, I just want colour everywhere so that the greyscaling goes well.
I've taken a couple of looks at mid-project greyscale output and it looks promising.
I pulled down Inkscape and will try to have it trace the path once I finish the clean up on the coastline and figure out what to do about the rivers.
The rivers are an issue because the original map had ones that looked good (easily visible) on the map. This mean that 'in scale' they could have estuaries/deltas from 5-25 miles wide and along a lot of their tapering length, they'd still in-scale be several miles wide. They're a lot thicker than thin blue lines which some map examples use. They look good, but they aren't represented accurately.
My options are:
a) Patch over the deltas along the coast so the coastline appears mostly contigous and then not allow the coastline path to trace the current river borders inland. This would allow me to add smaller blue-line style rivers.
b) Clean out (whiten) the water in all of these drawn major rivers and they they will de-facto become part of the overall continental coastline. (But I'm not sure what that does to my 'rivers' layer. It's interesting because a river can actually have deltas up to 50-60 miles in width so this almost does rise the level of coastal geography.
c) I guess a hybrid: Leave the deltas but snub them off so that the rivers inland become the blue line style. That's a compromise.
Not quite sure how to go with that yet.
I'll see what I get when I get done the cleanup and run it through inkscape (or if I have an inkscape issue as a new user). If the overall outline looks good, that'll be a lot of handraulic tracing out of the way!
I'll post back in the next couple of days.