Here's what it looks like with those new sheet effects. I can add more dunes as well -- either a few big ones, or more smaller ones? Also, I may have attached the wrong FCW file before.

No apologies necessary! I would be honored, and I would love to hear how it goes. I plan to find a home in the Atlas eventually, but I will post the FCWs here in the meantime with my blessing to use. Here are the FCWs for the outside, and for the third floor. I will post the other floors when they're ready.

We've been thinking of colors for sewers that are used for their traditional use. But if we start to think of the reasons why a necromancer might need a sewer-type system beneath their lair, or a demon lord, or an archfey, or even dwarves creating subterranean aqueduct, then all sorts of colors make sense: bright water, glowing green goo, rivers of blood, lava...the possibilities are endless.

Oh, fantastic! I will try that.

As soon as I posted it, I had an idea for how to do a semi-circular one using drawing lines to draw an irregular building that was 1/12th of a circle, and then copying 12 in a circular array. But yours will allow me to do an oval-shaped stadium. Thank you!

Okay, I think I've done my final tweaks for my practice sewers.

I realized that my sewer pipes weren't actually doing anything, so I used end-pipes off of T junctures to allow the graywater they're carrying to be deposited into the sewer canals. Added a few more bridges over the canals because there were a few areas that were inaccessible to maintenance workers. Tightened up the border texture. Moved the water (Effluent 05) in the storm drain canals to a new water sheet to give it a slightly higher transparency. (Not sure if I did that effectively or not.) And I added a bit more drama to the tentacle action in the lower right.

Been plotting out how the waste management system in my major cities will work. From the age of 6 to 14, I grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing, so the ecology of outhouses isn't foreign to me. (What do you do when you fill one up? Dig another hole, and with enough time, the first one will be ready to be re-used again.) We sorted recycling long before curbside recycling existed (not that we had a curb -- we were a mile outside of our tiny town of 3,000 people). Compostables were sorted four ways: veggie peelings and ends for the rabbits in their elevated hutches, coffee grounds went to the worms that broke down the rabbit droppings below the hutches, egg shells were ground up and fed back to the chickens to give them calcium to strengthen their shells, and the rest went to the compost heap. Glass was sorted into separate bins for clear, green, and brown glass. Metals were sorted into separate bins for tin and aluminum. The rest was junk. Plastic wasn't as prevalent then and wasn't recyclable, and had to be taken to the dumps for landfill. So yeah, I've been thinking about the waste management issues for a medieval city. But also: humans and intelligent humanoids are nothing if not resourceful and inventive. In a fantasy world, what sort of burrowing or earth-eating creatures could be put to use to make tunnels easier than medieval humans could? What sort of debris-eating creatures like gelatinous cubes could be used to manage waste? No need in my world to dump untreated sludge back into rivers or oceans!

And here are some of the Mike Schley style:

I changed the two labels to near-white for settlements and near-black for geographical names. (Let me know if you think I should reverse that, with dark names for settlements and light ones for geography.) Playing with text-along-a-curve for some mountain ranges and rivers, and moved some to the side to make them easier to read. (For a few of them, I had to explode the text and ungroup temporarily to adjust the kerning.) Made some effects changes to the political borders but I need to redraw them to reflect the river changes. Oh, and I embiggened the compass and moved it. It also has an inner glow to make it stand out a little.

May not have more time today to work on this -- about to head out to a family function for the day. Hoping to finish it this weekend.

Another holiday scene, this one a community of gnomes living near the North Pole working for a "jolly old elf" known as The Toy-Maker.

I have three versions: one daytime and two at night. One of the nighttime ones uses a galaxy background from one of the Cosmographer annuals (the bitmap file calls it "Hubble_Galaxy"), and the other uses a starfield background that comes with Cosmographer.

I may choose one of these to make into holiday cards. Does anyone have a favorite? Also, I put a tower on top of the castle to give it a little more, but does it look goofy there?

Daytime

Nighttime 1

Nighttime 2

OMG, I discovered that if you set three steps across with the center one (moved to front) in varicolor, you can create a carpet runner down the center of your staircase. My grand ballrooms will have the grandest of grand staircases!

I promise not to spam this thread with more discoveries, and will wait until Ralf has a chance to do the Live, but I just couldn't hold back with this one.

I'm pretty new to Campaign Cartographer -- or, rather, I've owned the software for ages but I'm new to actually making maps.

I keep saying I bought the software five years ago, but upon reflection, I think it was around 2016. Eight years ago! I played around a bit with Fractal Terrains, but everything was so intimidating! I had this idea that I could just fiddle around and learn it through trial and error, much like I've learned various desktop publishing and illustration programs and over the years. Didn't work! I didn't grasp the approach of choosing what you want to do and then picking the objects you want to do it to. It was counterintuitive and opposite of the image editing software I've used before, where you select the object and then select what you want to do with it.

I thought I could sit down and read the PDFs and learn that way. Nope! Every time I tried to map something, it looked nothing like the pretty pictures I'd see here. (Pro Tip: Even when you understand that sheet effects exist, you still have to turn sheet effects on to see the pretty effects!)

Finally in mid-2023, I decided to watch one of the tutorials. I started with one of the then-more recent Lives, and that was way too advanced, but it gave me a hint at CC3+'s tremendous power and potential. Then I found Joe Sweeney's tutorials, and everything clicked. His "Parrot Island" tutorial gave me a basic foundation, and then I plowed through the rest of his, and then ProFantasy's more "Intro to CC3"-type tutorials and the brief videos about specific functions and techniques before making my way back to the Live videos.

I was fiddling around with map-making in the second half of 2023, but mostly it was to practice specific techniques rather than design a proper map. I created an account on these forums in December of 2023 and posted my first attempt at a proper map (my Castle on a Cloud) in January of 2024 -- mere months ago!

I still watch the Lives every time there's a new one (and I always, always learn something new). I was watching the old ones in the downtime, but I think I've watched almost every single Live already (a few more than once, especially when there's something I want to attempt that I remember Ralf or Remy demonstrating). I've also watched Jim Sweeney's, Dogtag's, Remy's, and Joachim de Ravenbel's tutorials as well. (I find it quite peaceful and Zen to watch a blank canvas get turned into a work of art in under an hour!)