Hi everyone, I just found this lesson and registered to the forum only to follow it.
I am very interested in it. I had a long lonely afternoon and I did the whole lesson during that time.
So, you can say it is a bit slow, but I don't want to rush anyone !
I had purchased CC3 (CC3+ didn't exist at the time) some years ago and found it quite difficult to learn so I had given up. But now I am writing a tabletop RPG campaign and I need a couple maps for it to run. So, just so people know, your lesson seems to work well with the old CC3 (so far, at least). I don't have the same symbols but it's ok.
Cheers everyone
PS : it's great to have this lesson. I am not a video tutorials person.
I’m glad you are finding the lessons so useful. While some things have changed with the new version of CC3+, most of it is the same. So these lessons should work well for you most of the time. I will add your name to the class, thank you for joining I am glad we have all been helpful to you.
So if you are all caught up I will continue with the lessons. However, I think I am going to add a bit more to this lesson than I usually do, because I want to continue with the main lesson, but I also feel it is important to talk about how to select entities on our map effectively.
So I think I will begin with talking about where we left off. By now you should have many more hill symbols placed on your map. Your map should end up looking something like this.
Notice how I marked off some areas that do not have hills placed on top of the Hills Bitmap Fill?
I pointed that out because I wanted you to know that when placing symbols on your map, it is ok to let some of that show because of what the sheets and effects will do to it.
So if you have left a few gaps between the hills like I have done, I want you to turn on your Sheets and Effects. Remember how I showed you to get to the "Drawing Sheets and Effects" window? Go there again, and this time put a check mark in the "Activate Sheets and Effects" checkbox. Then go down and left click the button that says "Apply", then left click the "OK" button.
You have now successfully activated the Sheets and Effects.
Notice how the Sheets and Effects makes everything blend together? Nice, right? (note: the version of the map shown here does not have the sheets and effects turned on.)
I just thought it was important for you to know that you do not have to be absolutely perfect with the placement of your Symbols, because the Sheets and Effects can take care of some of that for you and still make your map look nice.
One of the things that makes Campaign Cartographer 3+ different from painting and graphics programs like Photoshop and Gimp is the way you choose to do something.
In reality, they both do the same thing, just in a different order. So for instance, say you wanted to erase one of the hills that we just put down.
It should be a simple matter to just do it, right? Well, it is, but not in the way you think.
Try to think of this as if someone were speaking to you in the English language. Basically you are trying to tell photoshop to erase the hill.
However photoshop does not speak English the way native speakers do. So the way you would tell photoshop to erase the hills would sound like this.
“Do it, hills, erase”.
Now that sounds very weird to a native English speaker because that is not how we talk. But that IS how commands in photoshop and Gimp an any other paint program talks to the computer to do something.
Effectively, you are telling your program that 1) you want to do something, 2) that you want whatever you are doing to affect the hills. 3) that the thing you want to do is erase. In a backwards way you are telling photoshop to erase the hills.
But in Campaign Cartographer 3+ we are speaking native English to the computer.
So it would go like this:
“Erase, hills, do it.”
So now we have 1) told the computer that we want to erase something 2) told the computer that the thing we want to erase is the hills. 3) told the computer that we are absolutely sure that we want to erase the hills so just do it.
So you are telling the computer to erase the hills and you are sure about it.
Does that make sense?
Ok, remember how I showed you how to erase something? Well, now that we have a bunch of hills gathered together on our map in close proximity to each other, we are going to practice erasing only one set of hills.
I want you to pick a set of hills somewhere in the middle of all of your hills and follow the instructions I gave you last time for erasing them.
Uh oh! What happened? How come you are getting multiple hills selected instead of just one at a time?
Well, this usually happens when entities are grouped together so closely on a map.
So how do we select only the one hill we want?
This requires a bit of explanation so please bare with me. This may sound a little technical but this is one of the most important things for you to learn.
When you are trying to select a Symbol to erase, the cursor changes to a little box. That little box is called a “Pick Cursor”.
The square on the cursor is used to pick a Symbol or Entity so that you can tell the computer what you want to do to that particular Symbol or Entity. (This will happen any time you are trying to edit an Entity or Symbol, not just when erasing).
Select the entity by clicking the box on the pick cursor on the edge of the entity.
When the entity is selected for edit, a purple line will appear around it.
Normally, you would now right click, then select Do it to execute the editing command.
However, since we are running into the problem of multiple entities being selected, we need to do something different.
Let me explain what is happening first. When you lay down your symbols so close together, the edges of each symbol are crossing over into the edges of other symbols. This makes it difficult for the “Pick Cursor” to target just one Symbol or Entity. Instead, it grabs anything that is within the Pick Cursor box.
So to fix this problem we simply hold down the CTRL button, while left clicking on the entity we want to remove.
So left clicking selects a Symbol or Entity, and holding down the CTRL button while left clicking de-selects a Symbol or Entity.
Pretty cool huh?
So I want you to practice selecting hills using this technique and erasing them. If you want to you can press the undo button to bring the hill back and then practice on that same hill again.
All done - and I took ages deleting, re-adding, and moving them around (also sorting the symbols) so that the arrangement ended up much worse than it started out (which is typical of me)
Oh, by the way tonnichiwa, I remember reading you had data loss at some point. Power failure is a bitch when you type a long text on the internet. Even using Notepad (pun intended) won't save you from that if you forget to save your work.
So I recommend using Notepad++. It's mainly designed for coders, but it's very light and it maintains your text even if you don't save it to a file. It has helped me a countless number of times.
There is also a browser plugin named Lazarus that keeps track of what you type and recovers it if you closed your browser or crashed.
I'm sorry Sue, I've been meaning to get another lesson up but I've been having unexpected real life things get in the way. I will try to get one up when I can tomorrow. Hopefully things calm down for me tomorrow. It's why I haven't done anything on my map making threads over on the CG site either.
I hope everyone had fun learning how to pick an entity or Symbol on your map. Now I want to let you know that there are more ways to pick entities on a map but in this lesson I wanted to talk more about a subject that some people may have a little trouble with. That is learning how to place a symbol so that it looks like it fits naturally into the scene you are trying to create with your map.
This goes a little bit different from the other lessons I have given because this has more to do with aesthetics than it does hard and fast mapping rules. But as I said, I wanted this class to be about how we can all become better mappers. I did not mean just from the technical side of things when I said that.
So, with this in mind, I was hoping to talk a little bit about how I personally place symbols on a map, and maybe some other people would like to talk about how they do it too. So I am inviting anyone who wants to, to share with us how you lay down your symbols. And how you decide which symbols to use in the first place.
I will begin with laying down my hills, since that is what we are doing in this map first. When I decide to lay down my hills I want to pick a spot that I consider to be the absolute highest spot on the map that I want my hills to start coming from. I will then lay down my hills background fill, and then, depending on the shape I have made my background fill, I will try to have the very first symbol of hills that I lay down match that shape or curve of the highest point on the hill bitmap fill.
Now, laying down your next hill is kind of important because believe it or not, it can set the tone of how the hills will look. So you could just lay down your second hill Symbol right next to the first one so that they are next to each other but not touching. That is a perfectly valid way of laying down hill Symbols if you really want to.
But I personally do not lay down hills that way. What I try to do is ever so slightly overlap the hills so that the second hill Symbol I lay down overlaps the side of the first hill Symbol, making sure that I am laying them all down so they mostly cover the Hill Bitmap Fill. When I get to an edge, I will usually try to find a hill Symbol that is not so big that it cannot be placed mostly on the bitmap fill, but I find it is also nice to let it go off occasionally. This adds a bit of randomness to the way the hills look so they are not so uniform and unnatural to my eye.
When I get to the second row of hill Symbols that I am placing, I will also overlap the bottom of a hill Symbol I have already placed, with the top of the hill Symbol that I am about to place. The entire reason I overlap my hill symbols like this is because most of the time, once you press the re draw button, and turn on the sheets and effects, the hills transform into a very nice looking group of hills that are meshed together because of the sheets and effects.
As I continue to go down the map, I am making sure that I place my hill symbols from either right to left, before moving on to the next row down, or from left to right, before moving on to the next row down.
It is ok to go from one symbol to another symbol right below the first, but I would only do that if I were making a very narrow group of hills.
Remember, with both hills and mountains, you should always move from left to right or from right to left and then go down as you place symbols. If you don’t do this you will probably end up placing symbols in the wrong place so that they have to be re arranged (probably with the SYMSORT command) so it is a good habit to learn.
When I finally get to the bottom of all of my hills, I will usually try to make the hills ever so slightly smaller near the bottom so that it looks like the hills are trailing off. Aesthetically I think it looks better but that is just my opinion.
So when doing something like mountains coming down from a mountain range at the top of a map, I tend to use the mountains that are the widest, without being too tall. This helps you to avoid having giant mountain tops sticking off of the edge of your map too far.
I just place them going left to right and when I place them on top of each other as I go down the map, I make sure that most of the mountain that I place a mountain in front of can still be seen.
Also, when you are placing mountains, you want to make sure that you do not repeat the same mountain over and over and over again. Give your mountains some variety so that they will look more natural. And don’t forget that you can reverse your Symbols. If you do this though, just be sure the Symbol you are reversing doesn’t have a built in shadow that reverses with it or you might end up with some very funny looking mountains. As I create my mountain range, I try to pick symbols that look like they would naturally go together as well. In some mapping styles, not all of the symbol types will look natural together.
For instance, in the Mike Schley style, there are some mountains that have trails going over the sides of them and one of those also has a tower on it. I would try to match those two mountains up so that it looks as if the trail begins from one mountain, and then continues on the other mountain. It will look like the trail dips behind one mountain to go to the other.
When placing Tree symbols, I will try to make sure that if there are forest symbols that are made up of many trees together, or that have an overall shape of a square, I will put other trees down before I place the forest symbol, and also put other trees down very close to the square symbol to round it out and make it look more natural. Often with trees I do it very tedious by placing a lot of single trees at a time.
When placing trees, you want to follow the same method of left to right or right to left as you go down your map.
Also, I try to place the right kind of trees based on what type of terrain I have laid down across my map. So for instance, if I am going to place trees in the mountains, they would probably be triangle shaped trees similar to Christmas trees, so basically pine trees.
As I get near the center of the map, I place trees in any forests that I have made with a few pine trees near the very top of the forests, and then work towards to more rounded trees. To me, this makes the trees seem to grow where they normally would in real life. Since there are a limited number of tree Symbols in any drawing style, try to break up any repeating patterns with the trees as you lay them down by adding more trees close to each symbol so it breaks the same repeating pattern.
Be careful when laying down your trees though so that you don’t lay down some trees in different rows, then decide to go back up to the top and lay some more symbols down because you might end up putting them over other trees and make it look unnatural by having one tree’s roots coming out of the branches of another and looking bad. Follow the progression of ALWAYS work from the top of the map down to the bottom when placing trees.
Try to experiment with the different colors and shades of greens and browns or even with blues, whites, or any other colors, with your varicolor trees as well. These can make some very interesting looking forests, especially if the forest is full of magic.
With cities, you don’t always have to lay down just one city Symbol. You can add multiple different kinds of symbols close together to create cities and towns. You can even use the varicolor buildings to make sure you have a little bit more variety. Some city symbols also have some trees built into the Symbol, and in the case of some of the Mike Schley Symbols, you can actually add another tree or two onto his City Symbols, even on the inside of the walls of the city Symbol. You might have to shrink the tree symbol down though, so it seems to look like it fits there naturally.
And don’t forget, you can reverse the symbols quite easily to make them seem like a completely different Symbol.
One of the things I will always try to do is look for different uses for my Symbols than what they seem to be designed for. For instance, in the Mike Schley style, there is a mountain that is obviously made to look as if it has space for a glacier symbol to be placed on top of it. These two symbols will fit together nicely and make for a wonderful looking glacier mountain.
However, you can also take the Volcano Symbol and use the varicolor version of the glacier, and place the glacier on the Volcano, only changing its color to orange or red, or even your own made up color. You would have to re size the Symbol so that it fits the volcano, but in the end you could have it so it looks like the Volcano is spewing lava.
So does anyone else want to give any ideas for how they would use or choose Symbols to use? Maybe you have different or favorite methods of doing things?
I usually use Herwin Wielink style, and find that the automatic random selection of the mountains with each placement varies them sufficiently, but you do have to keep swapping between the different sets available in the palette if you are doing a large mountain range
I also lay down the furthest row first, taking care to make a sine wave curve of heights from small at both ends to large in the middle, and use a mixture of hill and small mountain symbols towards the fringes of the range.
I'm not so keen on using the varicolour symbols as the symbols do tend to go completely all one colour and look a bit flat compared to the non-varicolour symbols, so if I do anything like that I do the whole map with varicolour symbols. It also pays to stick to less violent colours if you are using them... unless you really want a genuinely psychedelic map
You've clearly stunned everyone by asking for comments on how they use symbols, Tonnichiwa! It's a huge topic, of course. If you need certain kinds of symbol on a map, that will restrict your options immediately, especially if you're trying to stick to one overall CC3 style package, for instance. Plus, if you're making a map in a particular style, that may work better if you don't follow guidelines which may have more general applicability. For example, when using the Mercator Historical style from the very first Annual issue, that usually looks more "historical" if you use the symbols sparingly, and with little overlap.
Personally, I sometimes like to mix up the symbol styles, such as when I'm trying to represent areas of different cultures, or places where some unusual event has occurred (so some more jagged, "wrong", style mountains where a great magical explosion has happened, say). This is where I find having access to all the Annuals, as well as all the "regular" styles, plus whatever else I can find - like the Vintyri symbol packages, and even some of the older CC2-style symbols via the ProFantasy free Map & Catalog Library - can help, simply because it increases the range of options considerably, and improves my chances of finding something that will fit with whatever overall style I'm using.
Loopysue's point about the varicolour symbols is well-made, although sometimes that very "flatness" can be beneficial for especially "weird" areas. Another option, if you need a symbol with a particular colouring, is to find a suitable symbol available in just its line-art form, and then add appropriate coloured polygons "behind" the outline (either on a separate sheet, which means you can adjust the effects as well) or simply rearranged below the line-art on the Symbols sheet. That also works for non-symbol features, such as from a clipart font, if you haven't converted them to CC3 symbols, for instance. It is a bit fiddly at times, particularly if you need to do quite a few items, but it is a way to have more unique-looking symbols. And I should point out I learnt this trick simply because of the multi-sheet symbols used in that Mercator Annual pack (line-art mountains and hills, each with a coloured interior set on a separate sheet, which, when you apply the Sheet Effects makes the shading look like a weak watercolour wash)!
When I come up with a particular village/city/overland/dungeon style of buildings, etc. for a particular nation on my maps, I save that set of symbols as a symbol set. That way I'm consistant and no need to browse for symbols in that set.
I tend to do the same, but that's because I make a lot of my own symbols. I've got several catalogues with a mixture of my own and CC3 symbols now.
We may need to cover that later on, but the Joe Sweeny videos (hyperlinks available from the resources sticky at the top of the forum page) cover the 'how to' bit of doing it really well for anyone who wants to look ahead.
Thank you everyone for talking about how you pick and choose and lay down Symbols. There are some good ideas in there.
I’m not going to detail every single way of picking an entity because there are quite a few. If you want to know the other ways you should really read your CC3+ users manual. It should be able to help you with the other methods.
Instead, I want to show you another useful command. The “Trace” command.
The first thing I want you to do is go watch the excellent video that Dogtag made on how to use the Trace command. Then come back here and we will practice it……..
It can be found here in the thread at the top marked:
Interesting, Important, and Helpful Topics - Free Symbols, Resources, Tutorials & More. Then go to the tutorials box and look for "Dogtags Video Tutorials". Left click on that and then find the one that says "Trace Command". Then click on the video to watch it.
Go do that now.
Have you watched the video? Good. Then we can continue.
Since we are making an island, the island probably needs a few mountains. But we didn’t lay down any mountain fill yet. So let’s do that.
In your Campaign Cartographer User Interface I want you to navigate to the Mountain Symbols in your Symbol Catalog.
Right up above the window where you draw should be a button with a picture of a mountain on it. Left click that window to load the Mountain Symbols.
When the Mountain Symbols are loaded into your Symbol Catalog, I want you to navigate down until you find the “Mountains Bac” bitmap fill, then left click it so that it is the active Symbol on your cursor.
I want you to draw some Mountain Background bitmap fill on your map in the upper right corner, only this time I want you to draw it so that it hugs the coastline.
Well, how do you do that without having to zoom in really far? Simple. The Trace command.
With your Mountain Background bitmap fill active on your cursor, I want you to left click at point A to place the first point.
Then place a few points along the line B to create a smooth curve similar to the illustration.
As you approach point C, look at the prompt. It currently reads Next Point (DEL – back, T – Trace):. The text in parenthesizes are options we can invoke. In this case, we wish to start a trace, so hit the T key on your keyboard. The prompt immediately changes to Entity to trace.
Now, left click on the coastline near D to select it. This will tell the tool that we want to trace along the coastline. If you selected the coastline properly, the prompt should change to Starting point of portion. left click on the coastline near C to start the trace here.
Just like in the video, a line should appear. Now continue to move the line along to points E and F.
When you come to the F point I want you to left click on the F point, then move the cursor back onto the land and left click on the A point, and finally right click on the A point to complete your trace.
Next, go up to the Redraw button and left click it.
You have now successfully traced the coastline with the Mountain Background Bitmap fill. Now you can grab some mountains and start placing them so they look nice over the Mountain background of your map, similar to how you did the hills.
That's great Barliman! I had trouble with it for a very long time. Dogtag's video really helped me to do it right. I'm glad to hear this class is actually teaching people some good stuff
Lol....yep.... I remember this same thing happening when I was in high school. The teacher told everyone to draw something. He gave out the instructions to everyone and told everyone to draw a plate on a table with fruit.
Some of the people drew the fruit on the table, some off of the table on the floor, some drew the fruit on the plate, and some drew the fruit as a design on the table. Each person interpreted the exact same instructions in a very different way.
With the Trace command, it's important to remember you need to click the entity you want to trace in the direction you want to trace it - that's Tonnichiwa's point D - otherwise the command will try to trace around the coastline the "wrong" way.
Maybe also worth noting that the Command Prompt isn't case-sensitive, so you don't need to type a capital letter "T". Took me a while to be brave enough to try without doing that!
Hi everyone, I have been absent for a month because on Christmas Eve, I lost my internet connection (the satellite on the roof turned out to have a faulty connection), and then on New Years Eve, my 4 month old solid state hard drive died - and I forgot to back up my work for the previous 10 days - never again, I can tell you! It took a month to get a technician over to the island where I live, and fix the internet satellite, and about 1 week to get a new hard disk (on warrantt, thank goodness). Anyway, I'm back again, and hope to be working on my Annual Maps. In the meantime, here are the 4 maps I have redrawn following tonnichiwa's instructions.
Hi, Just an update from me. My internet bandwidth is very very low so the person that is paying for it has told me not to upload anything until sometime after the 1st of February. So I won't be uploading any pictures or have a lesson ready to go until then. Sorry if this inconveniences anyone. See you all back here sometime after the 1st!
Sorry that happened to you Quenten (I'm so used to calling you qwalker that this may take me a while to get used to). I'm glad you are getting it all straightened out.
I don't use mainline broadband - too many dead overheads, like line rental just for having a phone line in the building, and so on, makes it comparatively expensive. I use mobile broadband and a little device no bigger than the palm of my hand (half the size of an iPhone), and it gives me 20 gigs of broadband a month at twice the speed of a mainline broadband service - the broadband being provided by Three Mobile at just £13 a month. That's a lot of uploading/downloading for what is really a very reasonable price compared to these so called unlimited broadband mainline deals we get in the UK, where £13 a month would barely cover the monthly line rental, never mind the phone calls!
Comments
I am very interested in it. I had a long lonely afternoon and I did the whole lesson during that time.
So, you can say it is a bit slow, but I don't want to rush anyone !
I had purchased CC3 (CC3+ didn't exist at the time) some years ago and found it quite difficult to learn so I had given up. But now I am writing a tabletop RPG campaign and I need a couple maps for it to run. So, just so people know, your lesson seems to work well with the old CC3 (so far, at least). I don't have the same symbols but it's ok.
Cheers everyone
PS : it's great to have this lesson. I am not a video tutorials person.
I’m glad you are finding the lessons so useful. While some things have changed with the new version of CC3+, most of it is the same. So these lessons should work well for you most of the time. I will add your name to the class, thank you for joining I am glad we have all been helpful to you.
So if you are all caught up I will continue with the lessons. However, I think I am going to add a bit more to this lesson than I usually do, because I want to continue with the main lesson, but I also feel it is important to talk about how to select entities on our map effectively.
So I think I will begin with talking about where we left off. By now you should have many more hill symbols placed on your map. Your map should end up looking something like this.
Notice how I marked off some areas that do not have hills placed on top of the Hills Bitmap Fill?
I pointed that out because I wanted you to know that when placing symbols on your map, it is ok to let some of that show because of what the sheets and effects will do to it.
So if you have left a few gaps between the hills like I have done, I want you to turn on your Sheets and Effects. Remember how I showed you to get to the "Drawing Sheets and Effects" window? Go there again, and this time put a check mark in the "Activate Sheets and Effects" checkbox. Then go down and left click the button that says "Apply", then left click the "OK" button.
You have now successfully activated the Sheets and Effects.
Notice how the Sheets and Effects makes everything blend together? Nice, right? (note: the version of the map shown here does not have the sheets and effects turned on.)
I just thought it was important for you to know that you do not have to be absolutely perfect with the placement of your Symbols, because the Sheets and Effects can take care of some of that for you and still make your map look nice.
In reality, they both do the same thing, just in a different order. So for instance, say you wanted to erase one of the hills that we just put down.
It should be a simple matter to just do it, right? Well, it is, but not in the way you think.
Try to think of this as if someone were speaking to you in the English language. Basically you are trying to tell photoshop to erase the hill.
However photoshop does not speak English the way native speakers do. So the way you would tell photoshop to erase the hills would sound like this.
“Do it, hills, erase”.
Now that sounds very weird to a native English speaker because that is not how we talk. But that IS how commands in photoshop and Gimp an any other paint program talks to the computer to do something.
Effectively, you are telling your program that 1) you want to do something, 2) that you want whatever you are doing to affect the hills. 3) that the thing you want to do is erase. In a backwards way you are telling photoshop to erase the hills.
But in Campaign Cartographer 3+ we are speaking native English to the computer.
So it would go like this:
“Erase, hills, do it.”
So now we have 1) told the computer that we want to erase something 2) told the computer that the thing we want to erase is the hills. 3) told the computer that we are absolutely sure that we want to erase the hills so just do it.
So you are telling the computer to erase the hills and you are sure about it.
Does that make sense?
Ok, remember how I showed you how to erase something? Well, now that we have a bunch of hills gathered together on our map in close proximity to each other, we are going to practice erasing only one set of hills.
I want you to pick a set of hills somewhere in the middle of all of your hills and follow the instructions I gave you last time for erasing them.
Uh oh! What happened? How come you are getting multiple hills selected instead of just one at a time?
Well, this usually happens when entities are grouped together so closely on a map.
So how do we select only the one hill we want?
This requires a bit of explanation so please bare with me. This may sound a little technical but this is one of the most important things for you to learn.
When you are trying to select a Symbol to erase, the cursor changes to a little box. That little box is called a “Pick Cursor”.
The square on the cursor is used to pick a Symbol or Entity so that you can tell the computer what you want to do to that particular Symbol or Entity. (This will happen any time you are trying to edit an Entity or Symbol, not just when erasing).
Select the entity by clicking the box on the pick cursor on the edge of the entity.
When the entity is selected for edit, a purple line will appear around it.
Normally, you would now right click, then select Do it to execute the editing command.
However, since we are running into the problem of multiple entities being selected, we need to do something different.
Let me explain what is happening first. When you lay down your symbols so close together, the edges of each symbol are crossing over into the edges of other symbols. This makes it difficult for the “Pick Cursor” to target just one Symbol or Entity. Instead, it grabs anything that is within the Pick Cursor box.
So to fix this problem we simply hold down the CTRL button, while left clicking on the entity we want to remove.
So left clicking selects a Symbol or Entity, and holding down the CTRL button while left clicking de-selects a Symbol or Entity.
Pretty cool huh?
So I want you to practice selecting hills using this technique and erasing them. If you want to you can press the undo button to bring the hill back and then practice on that same hill again.
So I recommend using Notepad++. It's mainly designed for coders, but it's very light and it maintains your text even if you don't save it to a file. It has helped me a countless number of times.
There is also a browser plugin named Lazarus that keeps track of what you type and recovers it if you closed your browser or crashed.
I think everyone else must have got the post Christmas blues!
Shall we move on and let them catch up if they want to?
Please don't struggle to do this as well as everything else!
We can wait a few days... weeks.
I feel really bad about asking you now!
Sorry
I hope everyone had fun learning how to pick an entity or Symbol on your map. Now I want to let you know that there are more ways to pick entities on a map but in this lesson I wanted to talk more about a subject that some people may have a little trouble with. That is learning how to place a symbol so that it looks like it fits naturally into the scene you are trying to create with your map.
This goes a little bit different from the other lessons I have given because this has more to do with aesthetics than it does hard and fast mapping rules. But as I said, I wanted this class to be about how we can all become better mappers. I did not mean just from the technical side of things when I said that.
So, with this in mind, I was hoping to talk a little bit about how I personally place symbols on a map, and maybe some other people would like to talk about how they do it too. So I am inviting anyone who wants to, to share with us how you lay down your symbols. And how you decide which symbols to use in the first place.
I will begin with laying down my hills, since that is what we are doing in this map first. When I decide to lay down my hills I want to pick a spot that I consider to be the absolute highest spot on the map that I want my hills to start coming from. I will then lay down my hills background fill, and then, depending on the shape I have made my background fill, I will try to have the very first symbol of hills that I lay down match that shape or curve of the highest point on the hill bitmap fill.
Now, laying down your next hill is kind of important because believe it or not, it can set the tone of how the hills will look. So you could just lay down your second hill Symbol right next to the first one so that they are next to each other but not touching. That is a perfectly valid way of laying down hill Symbols if you really want to.
But I personally do not lay down hills that way. What I try to do is ever so slightly overlap the hills so that the second hill Symbol I lay down overlaps the side of the first hill Symbol, making sure that I am laying them all down so they mostly cover the Hill Bitmap Fill. When I get to an edge, I will usually try to find a hill Symbol that is not so big that it cannot be placed mostly on the bitmap fill, but I find it is also nice to let it go off occasionally. This adds a bit of randomness to the way the hills look so they are not so uniform and unnatural to my eye.
When I get to the second row of hill Symbols that I am placing, I will also overlap the bottom of a hill Symbol I have already placed, with the top of the hill Symbol that I am about to place. The entire reason I overlap my hill symbols like this is because most of the time, once you press the re draw button, and turn on the sheets and effects, the hills transform into a very nice looking group of hills that are meshed together because of the sheets and effects.
As I continue to go down the map, I am making sure that I place my hill symbols from either right to left, before moving on to the next row down, or from left to right, before moving on to the next row down.
It is ok to go from one symbol to another symbol right below the first, but I would only do that if I were making a very narrow group of hills.
Remember, with both hills and mountains, you should always move from left to right or from right to left and then go down as you place symbols. If you don’t do this you will probably end up placing symbols in the wrong place so that they have to be re arranged (probably with the SYMSORT command) so it is a good habit to learn.
When I finally get to the bottom of all of my hills, I will usually try to make the hills ever so slightly smaller near the bottom so that it looks like the hills are trailing off. Aesthetically I think it looks better but that is just my opinion.
So when doing something like mountains coming down from a mountain range at the top of a map, I tend to use the mountains that are the widest, without being too tall. This helps you to avoid having giant mountain tops sticking off of the edge of your map too far.
I just place them going left to right and when I place them on top of each other as I go down the map, I make sure that most of the mountain that I place a mountain in front of can still be seen.
Also, when you are placing mountains, you want to make sure that you do not repeat the same mountain over and over and over again. Give your mountains some variety so that they will look more natural. And don’t forget that you can reverse your Symbols. If you do this though, just be sure the Symbol you are reversing doesn’t have a built in shadow that reverses with it or you might end up with some very funny looking mountains.
As I create my mountain range, I try to pick symbols that look like they would naturally go together as well. In some mapping styles, not all of the symbol types will look natural together.
For instance, in the Mike Schley style, there are some mountains that have trails going over the sides of them and one of those also has a tower on it. I would try to match those two mountains up so that it looks as if the trail begins from one mountain, and then continues on the other mountain. It will look like the trail dips behind one mountain to go to the other.
When placing Tree symbols, I will try to make sure that if there are forest symbols that are made up of many trees together, or that have an overall shape of a square, I will put other trees down before I place the forest symbol, and also put other trees down very close to the square symbol to round it out and make it look more natural. Often with trees I do it very tedious by placing a lot of single trees at a time.
When placing trees, you want to follow the same method of left to right or right to left as you go down your map.
Also, I try to place the right kind of trees based on what type of terrain I have laid down across my map. So for instance, if I am going to place trees in the mountains, they would probably be triangle shaped trees similar to Christmas trees, so basically pine trees.
As I get near the center of the map, I place trees in any forests that I have made with a few pine trees near the very top of the forests, and then work towards to more rounded trees. To me, this makes the trees seem to grow where they normally would in real life. Since there are a limited number of tree Symbols in any drawing style, try to break up any repeating patterns with the trees as you lay them down by adding more trees close to each symbol so it breaks the same repeating pattern.
Be careful when laying down your trees though so that you don’t lay down some trees in different rows, then decide to go back up to the top and lay some more symbols down because you might end up putting them over other trees and make it look unnatural by having one tree’s roots coming out of the branches of another and looking bad. Follow the progression of ALWAYS work from the top of the map down to the bottom when placing trees.
Try to experiment with the different colors and shades of greens and browns or even with blues, whites, or any other colors, with your varicolor trees as well. These can make some very interesting looking forests, especially if the forest is full of magic.
With cities, you don’t always have to lay down just one city Symbol. You can add multiple different kinds of symbols close together to create cities and towns. You can even use the varicolor buildings to make sure you have a little bit more variety. Some city symbols also have some trees built into the Symbol, and in the case of some of the Mike Schley Symbols, you can actually add another tree or two onto his City Symbols, even on the inside of the walls of the city Symbol. You might have to shrink the tree symbol down though, so it seems to look like it fits there naturally.
And don’t forget, you can reverse the symbols quite easily to make them seem like a completely different Symbol.
One of the things I will always try to do is look for different uses for my Symbols than what they seem to be designed for. For instance, in the Mike Schley style, there is a mountain that is obviously made to look as if it has space for a glacier symbol to be placed on top of it. These two symbols will fit together nicely and make for a wonderful looking glacier mountain.
However, you can also take the Volcano Symbol and use the varicolor version of the glacier, and place the glacier on the Volcano, only changing its color to orange or red, or even your own made up color. You would have to re size the Symbol so that it fits the volcano, but in the end you could have it so it looks like the Volcano is spewing lava.
So does anyone else want to give any ideas for how they would use or choose Symbols to use? Maybe you have different or favorite methods of doing things?
I also lay down the furthest row first, taking care to make a sine wave curve of heights from small at both ends to large in the middle, and use a mixture of hill and small mountain symbols towards the fringes of the range.
Personally, I sometimes like to mix up the symbol styles, such as when I'm trying to represent areas of different cultures, or places where some unusual event has occurred (so some more jagged, "wrong", style mountains where a great magical explosion has happened, say). This is where I find having access to all the Annuals, as well as all the "regular" styles, plus whatever else I can find - like the Vintyri symbol packages, and even some of the older CC2-style symbols via the ProFantasy free Map & Catalog Library - can help, simply because it increases the range of options considerably, and improves my chances of finding something that will fit with whatever overall style I'm using.
Loopysue's point about the varicolour symbols is well-made, although sometimes that very "flatness" can be beneficial for especially "weird" areas. Another option, if you need a symbol with a particular colouring, is to find a suitable symbol available in just its line-art form, and then add appropriate coloured polygons "behind" the outline (either on a separate sheet, which means you can adjust the effects as well) or simply rearranged below the line-art on the Symbols sheet. That also works for non-symbol features, such as from a clipart font, if you haven't converted them to CC3 symbols, for instance. It is a bit fiddly at times, particularly if you need to do quite a few items, but it is a way to have more unique-looking symbols. And I should point out I learnt this trick simply because of the multi-sheet symbols used in that Mercator Annual pack (line-art mountains and hills, each with a coloured interior set on a separate sheet, which, when you apply the Sheet Effects makes the shading look like a weak watercolour wash)!
We may need to cover that later on, but the Joe Sweeny videos (hyperlinks available from the resources sticky at the top of the forum page) cover the 'how to' bit of doing it really well for anyone who wants to look ahead.
I’m not going to detail every single way of picking an entity because there are quite a few. If you want to know the other ways you should really read your CC3+ users manual. It should be able to help you with the other methods.
Instead, I want to show you another useful command. The “Trace” command.
The first thing I want you to do is go watch the excellent video that Dogtag made on how to use the Trace command. Then come back here and we will practice it……..
It can be found here in the thread at the top marked:
Interesting, Important, and Helpful Topics - Free Symbols, Resources, Tutorials & More. Then go to the tutorials box and look for "Dogtags Video Tutorials". Left click on that and then find the one that says "Trace Command". Then click on the video to watch it.
Go do that now.
Have you watched the video? Good. Then we can continue.
Since we are making an island, the island probably needs a few mountains. But we didn’t lay down any mountain fill yet. So let’s do that.
In your Campaign Cartographer User Interface I want you to navigate to the Mountain Symbols in your Symbol Catalog.
Right up above the window where you draw should be a button with a picture of a mountain on it. Left click that window to load the Mountain Symbols.
When the Mountain Symbols are loaded into your Symbol Catalog, I want you to navigate down until you find the “Mountains Bac” bitmap fill, then left click it so that it is the active Symbol on your cursor.
I want you to draw some Mountain Background bitmap fill on your map in the upper right corner, only this time I want you to draw it so that it hugs the coastline.
Well, how do you do that without having to zoom in really far? Simple. The Trace command.
With your Mountain Background bitmap fill active on your cursor, I want you to left click at point A to place the first point.
Then place a few points along the line B to create a smooth curve similar to the illustration.
As you approach point C, look at the prompt. It currently reads Next Point (DEL – back, T – Trace):. The text in parenthesizes are options we can invoke. In this case, we wish to start a trace, so hit the T key on your keyboard. The prompt immediately changes to Entity to trace.
Now, left click on the coastline near D to select it. This will tell the tool that we want to trace along the coastline. If you selected the coastline properly, the prompt should change to Starting point of portion. left click on the coastline near C to start the trace here.
Just like in the video, a line should appear. Now continue to move the line along to points E and F.
When you come to the F point I want you to left click on the F point, then move the cursor back onto the land and left click on the A point, and finally right click on the A point to complete your trace.
Next, go up to the Redraw button and left click it.
You have now successfully traced the coastline with the Mountain Background Bitmap fill. Now you can grab some mountains and start placing them so they look nice over the Mountain background of your map, similar to how you did the hills.
I really hope you don't want us to put anything in that gap you have there between the mountains and the hills!?
I had to bunch mine together because of where the hills were on my map.
still - I can improvise if necessary
(just don't tell the river police, ok!)
Thanks for being part of it
Better put that right then...
Some of the people drew the fruit on the table, some off of the table on the floor, some drew the fruit on the plate, and some drew the fruit as a design on the table. Each person interpreted the exact same instructions in a very different way.
Maybe also worth noting that the Command Prompt isn't case-sensitive, so you don't need to type a capital letter "T". Took me a while to be brave enough to try without doing that!
I have been absent for a month because on Christmas Eve, I lost my internet connection (the satellite on the roof turned out to have a faulty connection), and then on New Years Eve, my 4 month old solid state hard drive died - and I forgot to back up my work for the previous 10 days - never again, I can tell you! It took a month to get a technician over to the island where I live, and fix the internet satellite, and about 1 week to get a new hard disk (on warrantt, thank goodness). Anyway, I'm back again, and hope to be working on my Annual Maps. In the meantime, here are the 4 maps I have redrawn following tonnichiwa's instructions.
Sorry that happened to you Quenten (I'm so used to calling you qwalker that this may take me a while to get used to). I'm glad you are getting it all straightened out.
I don't use mainline broadband - too many dead overheads, like line rental just for having a phone line in the building, and so on, makes it comparatively expensive. I use mobile broadband and a little device no bigger than the palm of my hand (half the size of an iPhone), and it gives me 20 gigs of broadband a month at twice the speed of a mainline broadband service - the broadband being provided by Three Mobile at just £13 a month. That's a lot of uploading/downloading for what is really a very reasonable price compared to these so called unlimited broadband mainline deals we get in the UK, where £13 a month would barely cover the monthly line rental, never mind the phone calls!
Hope that helps in some way?