Struggling to move from beginner to intermediate: Project I: Mercator World Map
Hey guys.
I've had CC3+ for a few years and have made some great little dungeons and small regoinal (about 100 sq mi) maps with it, and I really enjoy it.
I start to get into mysterious territory when trying to go "big" and map countries, regions, continents, or worlds for a few reasons.
1: I have trouble figuring out how to have the established climates of my setting
2: I have trouble "scaling" smaller maps ive made to look like they are blown up regions of larger maps.
I've seen the "community atlas" project and really admired it as it develops so, I figured I'd try to get the attention of folks working on that so i can see how they are appropriately scaling everything.
I've got like tons of crap. So much stuff. I don't have all the annuals, but have most of them (up to about 2015ish) I have like every addon. I can do it all here.
I want to start with a world map, and I think i've settled on a style: the annual 2007 mercator style with a twin globe layout. if you have the annual, would be Overland maps/Defind templates: Mercator Globe .fct
This works since the setting im working in is 18th century and that looks like it was drawn by People in the late renissanse. :)
here's all the requirements I need:
1:The main campaign area is roughly analogus to north africa and europe. There needs to be some water way that seperates these areas, but is easilly navigable.
2: In the "europe" region, there's a huge mountain range seperating the "east" from the "west" turn the alps into the andes.
3: I need to have warm meditteranian climate in the southern half of the "europe" regoin, but in the northern spike of the large mountain range, I need to hit bitterly cold, almost polar temperatures
4: the "north africa" area needs to be hevilly desertified and very warm
5: There needs to be vast, and I mean VAST plains outside of these two regions, but connected by land. The more inhospitible and horrifying we can make these plains, the better. THis region of the world is known as "the plains of woe"
6: In another region connected to the landmass, roughly analogous to southeast asia, there should be a large terrain artifiact that allows the people there to sort of hide from the monsters in the plains of woe
7: bonus points if we can put a meteorite crater in the plains of woe
8: There's another large set of continenents across a big sea. Not much detail about what's there, but they are there.
Okay, so... advice? :P
I've had CC3+ for a few years and have made some great little dungeons and small regoinal (about 100 sq mi) maps with it, and I really enjoy it.
I start to get into mysterious territory when trying to go "big" and map countries, regions, continents, or worlds for a few reasons.
1: I have trouble figuring out how to have the established climates of my setting
2: I have trouble "scaling" smaller maps ive made to look like they are blown up regions of larger maps.
I've seen the "community atlas" project and really admired it as it develops so, I figured I'd try to get the attention of folks working on that so i can see how they are appropriately scaling everything.
I've got like tons of crap. So much stuff. I don't have all the annuals, but have most of them (up to about 2015ish) I have like every addon. I can do it all here.
I want to start with a world map, and I think i've settled on a style: the annual 2007 mercator style with a twin globe layout. if you have the annual, would be Overland maps/Defind templates: Mercator Globe .fct
This works since the setting im working in is 18th century and that looks like it was drawn by People in the late renissanse. :)
here's all the requirements I need:
1:The main campaign area is roughly analogus to north africa and europe. There needs to be some water way that seperates these areas, but is easilly navigable.
2: In the "europe" region, there's a huge mountain range seperating the "east" from the "west" turn the alps into the andes.
3: I need to have warm meditteranian climate in the southern half of the "europe" regoin, but in the northern spike of the large mountain range, I need to hit bitterly cold, almost polar temperatures
4: the "north africa" area needs to be hevilly desertified and very warm
5: There needs to be vast, and I mean VAST plains outside of these two regions, but connected by land. The more inhospitible and horrifying we can make these plains, the better. THis region of the world is known as "the plains of woe"
6: In another region connected to the landmass, roughly analogous to southeast asia, there should be a large terrain artifiact that allows the people there to sort of hide from the monsters in the plains of woe
7: bonus points if we can put a meteorite crater in the plains of woe
8: There's another large set of continenents across a big sea. Not much detail about what's there, but they are there.
Okay, so... advice? :P
Comments
South hemisphere has many more islands and island groups.
I made nation maps from the continent maps, then district maps from the nation maps. Then made some towns, and small cities on searate maps.
Originally Crestar was just the southern hemisphere I built up from 5mm hex maps, into continents, etc. I couldn't get my brain to go from small to big maps. So I redid the south hemisphere starting big and going small.
FT3 to make planets is ood; however, it doesn't do rain shadows.
My suggestion is to make a hemisphere or world map, and using bitmap fills, show the different temperature zones. Don;'t use symbols at the continent level, except maybe a marker for one or two important cities per continent.
Addng in lots of symbols at the continent level will slow redraw time ay down. So avoid putting them on the map. You can use different colors or bitmap fills to show large forests and large mountain areas. Smaller detail maps is where you would use the symbols.
Northern Hemisphere
Southern Hemisphere
From those maps you can see how I did arctic areas, deserts, islands, etc. The large black Xs are the possible locations for portals/gates to other parts of the planet. That bit is on the back burner so to speak.
If you want to look at the fcw files, I can whisper them to you here.
source world map with same style:
super rough outline of trying to accomplish my desires:
obvoiusly these landmasses are ugly and need to be re-worked, but this should help conceptialize my goals. the southern mountain rantge i think is the barrier of the "fields of woe" region, where the northern mountains are the ones that seperate "not-europe"
I can re-do, but i rather like these landmasses. Thoughts?
At your current scale, large nations, large mountain ranges, and a few large forests would be about it.
Of course, other folks may have different ideas.
In terms of the look of the landmasses, the only important factor is do YOU like the way they are? It's your world, after all!
The sole comment I'd make is you need to look again at your southern polar continent, because the edges shown in the two hemisphere maps need to match up, which they clearly don't right now.
I rather like the "dragon's maw" look to the northern part of your right-hemisphere map. Presumably that's for the "North Africa to Europe" region you mentioned in your original posting.