Yes, I did use the draw tools for the trees - worked great! For the river, I used "Change like draw tool" to change it to the 75-foot river. I also used the "Change like draw tool" for the sea (the straight closed polygon water tool), the three main roads, the round towers, the square gatehouse towers, the docks, the parks, and the buildings. I used the draw tools (but not the "Change like draw tools") for the city walls, the bridges, the trees, the darker grass beneath the trees directly to the south-east of the castle, the fields, the hedges, the dirt roads, the town square, and the forest on the north side of the map. For the heraldic symbol, I did as you advised, moving the components to the appropriate sheets and changing to a solid color. (Interestingly, the deer didn't fill in completely, just the outline.)

There were some minor issues that had to do with how Watabou exported the data. The river was in multiple sections, broken by the bridges, and the stretch between the final bridge and the sea wasn't there at all, so I did that part using the draw tools. The major road coming in from the west continued up the river a bit, so I had to trim off that part. Same with the road coming in from the south: it continued down the river from where I put the wooden bridge. So you just have to pay attention to what's being changed to make sure the right things are being changed properly, knowing that you might have to trim a bit here and there, or use the drawing tools to add a bit.

But overall, worked great! I am going to do a larger town now, and will time it to see how long it takes.

I've played with a few different options. Thought I could copy the Random Street buildings to a sheet below and then turn then into a gray polygon, but if there's a way to do that without it being a gray house, I haven't figured it out. Tried the colorize effect to mute the effects of the background. Of course, I could delete the background terrain and redraw it around the houses, like for backyards.

But I think, since it's such a small map, that I will just limit the Random Street houses to a few around the paved plaza, like they are specialty shops or government buildings, and then hand-place the rest with the buildings symbols.

Hi Reddog! Welcome.

I'm pretty new here myself — though I’ve owned the software for many years, it’s only been about six months since I realized I couldn’t learn it simply by experimenting. The tutorials really, really helped me.

I’ll let others with more experience guide you, but my two cents: it sounds like Dungeon Designer will best achieve what you want. The name implies old-school D&D dungeons and caverns, but it's really great for any type of inside or outside floorplan (a house, a temple, some crypts, a section of a forest road where bandits are lurking to attack). If you want something that you can use figures on, whether to print out to use with miniatures or to use on screen with a virtual table top, Dungeon Designer will probably suit you best.

As for tutorials, which is how I learned: the new ones are great but I would start with some of the older ones to get the basics down. On the Video Tutorials page, you'll find a really well organized list. I started with Joe Sweeney's, which did a great job starting with the basics. They are old, and some tips have been superseded by software advancements. (For example, Joe made a point in the older videos of talking about placing symbols from the back and moving forward, but now there's a "Sort Symbols on Map" function that makes that advice no longer necessary.) But they really helped me get the concepts down.

The Learning CC3+ videos will give you a good grounding in the basic tools. I would then proceed to the Quickies section. With the Campaign Cartographer Concepts and Blog Videos, I would recommend going to specific ones once you've got the basics down and have a specific question about a technique or tool.

The Live videos are really great, but each one covers lots of different techniques, and many of the newer ones assume some basic knowledge, so I wouldn't start with them. Once you've gotten the basics down, you might want to look at the names to see if there are some tackling stuff similar to what you're doing. For example, if you're designing a dungeon, "Creating dungeon with the Jon Roberts style" and "Livemapping: Dungeon & Cave" would be useful. I've gone through almost the entire archives of Live videos and I learn something from every single one, but you'll want to have the basics down first.

Okay, I made some screen captures and JPG saves to illustrate the process.

The first thing to know is that there are 18 levels to the temple, with a wider landing (15 feet instead of 5) on the 6th and 12th levels. And the second thing to know is that every level actually has three sheets:

(1) the main sheet for the level, with the stone fill;

(2) a sheet below it of a different color, because the beveling effect on the main sheet can cause weird pockmarks if it gets confused with the colors below the sheet with the beveling effect; and

(3) a sheet above the main one for the level for the sandy debris.

I called the sheet below the main one for each level of the temple "Inlay," because at one point I thought I might have brass or gold inlays on each level, but I ended up only doing that at the top.

Here's what Level 6 looks like with all three of its sheets on but all of the other sheets hidden (except for the 5th level as well as the stairs, just to provide perspective):

You can see erosion around the sides as well as some cracks (like from the stairs on the south side, as well as a little above the western stairs).

On the "inlay" level below, I put a polygon of solid color. I made it brown, because if it was the same gray as the stonework above, the beveling on the sheet above it would get confused and create weird pockmarks. But I also added a gray inside GLOW effect so that it look gray when it showed through the erosion:

Okay, here's how I did the erosion. First, I added the COLOR KEY sheet effect to that sheet, using the default magenta #6. (Also, it's important to put that sheet effect first on the list, before the Glows and Bevel and Wall Shadow).

This effect tells CC3+ that when it sees anything of that magenta color on that sheet, cut through whatever's on that sheet and instead show the sheet below it (in this case, the brown-with-gray-glow on the Temple Level 6 Inlay sheet).

I then used the fractal polygon tool to create small bits with that same magenta color, as well as the fractal line drawing tool to create the cracks. Here it is with the sheet effects turned off so you can see the magenta color, along with a zoomed-in version to see it a little better:

(There's a fractal crack in the stone above the fractal blobs. You can barely see it but it works when the sheet effects are turned on.)

When the sheet effects are turned on, anything on that sheet that's covered by by the magenta polygon will be cut away, showing instead whatever is on the sheet behind the stone. It doesn't matter if the color key cutout extends onto the white part, because there's nothing to cut away there and the sheet below would have been shown anyway.

Here's what the whole thing looks like with sheet effects turned off.

Crazy how powerful CC3+ is to be able render all of those effects to turn this mess into an identifiable ziggurat.

If anyone is interested, here is the FCW file. (It's slow loading when the sheet effects are turned on because of all of the nodes added by the fractal bits.)

Another revelation that will be obvious to more experienced cartographers here: the TEXTURIZE effect!

I have been wanting to use heraldic symbols stitched onto fabric to make carpets, table runners, banners...and I kept looking in vain for fabric fills. The Modern set includes different colors of carpeting, but it was a little too photorealistic to work with things like Dungeons of Schley.

Through trial and lots of error, I stumbled across the Texture effect and was able to apply it to both a color polygon and the heraldic symbol on top of it to create the effect of fabric with the symbol stitched on. I experimented with a lot of textures, but the one that seemed most "fabric-like" to me was the DD3 Hay_Dry fill. (If anyone knows of a fill that looks more like linen or other woven fabric, please let me know. Maybe there's a good one in an Annual that I have not yet purchased.) And of course, different fills can create the effect of looking like your sigil was painted on wood, or the cobblestone floor (though with more trial and error, I learned that some fills don't really translate well when used with the Texturize effect).

Anyway, here are some heraldic banners or carpets or table runners or whatever: