In this week's Live Mapping, and inspired by last week's Birdseye Continental style, Ralf will be tackling another texture-based style with Satellite Overland from Cosmographer 3.

Come along and join in the chat on Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTNHKgjQ6g

Or watch it on the forum here*

*This thread isn't monitored during the show, but is a place where you can continue the discussion afterwards if you want.

Here's an idea I had the other day - to paint everything in Artrage. First I tried a grass texture, which unfortunately will have to be redone because the paint was too thick and left odd lumps.

I've added a couple of Mike Schley mountains for scale, and the previous unpainted and very draft mountain I did a couple of weeks ago. If I go down the oil painting route for the whole style, the resulting maps will look like detailed oil paintings.

Please ignore the funny lumps that look like I threw a bucket of dust at the canvas, and let me know what you think?

Do you think this is enough craters?

I still have a few more things on the list. These are: mesas, cliffs, ravines, and ripples. A ripple is a more slender ridge that has no side spurs - a kind of rock topped hill.

Which of these would you prefer to see done first, given that the clock is ticking.

Or maybe something else is more important to you than these geographical features?

Here's a quick scale bar and compass.

I've done quite a bit more work on the ridges, and also the overall colour scheme.

And there are varicolour versions as well, with special colours in the custom palette to match the style fills.

Smaller ridges and mountains to come, along with other things as I think of them.

I think I might have sorted out the general volcanic theme. If you are happy with this as the toolkit I'll make the mirror copies of the volcano symbols.

How am I doing for colour and texture in the ocean and landmass?

Please be honest.

I took a break from compasses and scale bars for DD4 to hunt down a very rough untextured test mapped mountain I did back in 2022. Found it, and tried it out.

This is the map file and graphic in Affinity.

And this is what it looks like in CC3.

Obviously, this is just a very basic test, but it's a start.

Hi Jossy :)

Zoom and pan delays are normal for CC, particularly when you are using mouse pan and zoom. It's faster when you use the zoom controls in the top right corner:

Zoom to extents |CC2ZEXT|, then define a rectangle any size you wish for the part you want to fill the window |CC2ZWIN|.

If you are working on a large map you might occaisonally see a green window for a second or two. This is also quite normal. The display will recover without crashing. On seriously massive maps the green screen can appear for several seconds, but CC still won't crash if you let it do it's thing.

There are two main ways to increase the speed on such a map. Hit the Display Speed Settings button on the left |CC2RESMODE| and either pick Medium Automatic bitmap quality, or use a Fixed bitmap quality of High or Low. These modified settings only last the current session and I don't think they affect your export resolution settings.

In really large city maps many of us put different districts on newly created layers (same sheet, different layer) so we can show or hide districts depending on what we are working on. Then it's generally only slow when it's time to export the map and you have to show all the layers.

I hope that helps a little.

I've been a bit busy doing DD4 things, but I'm going to take a few breaks this week/next week to map Elkton for the competition.

The map notes for Alarius are that it is a continent of high fantasy and magic. I'll have to see what I can do to capture that kind of atmosphere. Elkton is one of the most northerly settlements, so there are bound to be a few legends from the cold dark north.