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Royal Scribe

Royal Scribe

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Royal Scribe
Joined
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3,073
Birthday
February 5, 1968
Location
San Francisco, California
Real Name
Kevin
Rank
Mapmaker
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16

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  • First Time Mapper, First Time Poster, Long Time Struggling Learner

    Welcome, Matthew!

    I agree wholeheartedly with Ricko's recommendation to start with Joe Sweeney's videos. I owned the software for many years, trying to teach myself how to use it through the PDF manuals and fiddling around with it, but could not make any sense of it. I would peek at this Forum and admire everyone's beautiful maps, but could not make any sense of the software. Then I stumbled across Joe's videos and everything clicked.

    Joe's videos are old, but still relevant and give a good foundation for the software. Once you've watched those ones, I would recommend checking out more videos here:

    https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/10519/video-tutorials/p1

    The viewing order of those videos that I think may be most helpful (in order to get a foundation before tackling more advanced subjects):

    1. Joe Sweeney
    2. Dogtag's and Josh Plunkett's
    3. Learning CC3+ Section
    4. Quickies
    5. Campaign Cartographer Concepts

    The ones in the section called "Blog Videos" accompany a blog article on the same topic, so I would recommend tracking down those blog posts. And the ones under the Live Tutorial section are fantastic, but most are not focused on a single technique or tool, and some are more advanced than others. I would try to get a good grounding from the other videos first, and then consider the older Live videos before the newer ones unless you see one on a specific topic that you think will be helpful. The Live videos are also really enlightening about the possibilities with the range of add-ons.

    I resisted watching the videos for a long time because I was impatient and thought I could read the PDFs faster than watching a video. And that clearly didn't work for me: I bought the software in 2017 and didn't start watching the videos until mid/late-2023, and didn't make any maps until then either. But honestly, watching really made everything fall into place for me. Plus, I just love seeing someone start with a blank canvass and bring it to life to become a work of art. It's like watching Bob Ross painting videos. I've not only learned techniques from the Live videos, I've also been creatively inspired by them, too.

    roflo1
  • Missing Fill and Castles Failure

    Moat is a water fill from Vol 13 but you could substitute any water fill you want.

    Calibre
  • Missing Fill and Castles Failure

    Don’t worry about Cobble Final. It shows as missing on mine, too. Remy said something about how that shows up and is a weird legacy fill, or something like that.

    The Beaumaris Castle fills are from CA 2019 (volume 13). Did you get that one?

    Calibre
  • Birdseye Continental - style development thread

    I like them!

    For those who are interested in learning how to create these but learn better by watching, Ralf has a good tutorial about creating varicolor symbols, starting with the vector ones.

    Loopysue
  • Birdseye Continental - style development thread

    EDIT: Shortly after I started reading the link Joe gave above, I realised that the names of things also vary between two countries that share a common language. What I know in the UK as a watershed is known as a divide in the US.

    Hence the old expression, "The British and the Americans are two great peoples divided by a common tongue."

    Loopysue