Well, I finished the more simple map as one of the example maps, and I think it shows the style more clearly. One of the other examples is a conversion of Ranger's Hill from Forest Trail part 2. It should be reasonably easy to convert Forest Trail maps to Winter Trail maps.

Winter Trail is due out as the March issue this year.

Both of my example maps can be viewed at much higher resolution in my New Style Example Maps gallery.

Sorry, @JulianDracos! I got notification that there was a comment on my thread and only saw Dalton's at the bottom of the page.

Those two textures are indeed marble, and I was already thinking that they are too purplish blue. The strange thing is that this has only looked wrong since I made the rock a warmer grey than it was to start with. It's one of those curious things that happen when you start making lots of different greys to use together. They don't always look all that great unless you use the same kind of grey, or very closely related greys. In effect they are now a very dull mix of purple and orange together (the marbles and the rest of the stone stuff). No worries - it will look better when I'm done with it ;)

The grout on the flagstones is deliberately flat with equal shadow all around each stone. That is because if you give it a 3D effect the light has to come from a particular direction, so the floor looks odd if you align the fill to a different angle. We'll see how it goes.

There are other textures. I just didn't manage to get them all in shot. There's another surface dirt loam texture, green slime and the mud is there around the water's edge. There's not quite enough of it showing for you to see it properly. The textures in this shot seem to have been doubled up, even though I did a search for VH. I think it looked in a subfolder as well as the main fill folder.

There are two stone and two rock textures at the moment. I'm having to keep the number of variations down just a bit to compensate for the fact that these are some very large textures (as you can see from the info box on that rock texture - 3000 px square). That's so you don't get as much of the repeating pattern, but it does mean that every texture has to really carry its weight and be worth the expense on the cache memory in CC3. So it's best to start with just two of each thing and work from there ;)

@caveCrawler Do you mean like this?

Yes, I see.

I think I'm stuck in dungeon mode at the moment. I'm automatically assuming that everything is lit from above, which is quite wrong since the shadows in the map indicate a north west light source. I might flip that to a more realistic angle from the south, bearing in mind the position of the continent in the northern hemisphere.

I made more trouble for myself by making the snow really thin. Maybe it should all be in the valley bottom with the slope bare.

Anyway! I decided that snow loaded pines looked wrong on the ground that wasn't snowy and switched them out (maybe temporarily) for trees from Darklands City.

I like the map with these colours, but it doesn't really make sense.

It's possible you have an effect in the Whole Drawing category. In this map I have an RGB Matrix Process turning the entire map grey

To check your own map click the Whole Drawing radio button at the top of the effects panel. Anything there will affect the entire map.

I've located the original work files for this set of hedges from about 3-4 years ago. Unfortunately the symbols themselves need to be regenerated and the source files look a bit of a mess. But is this the sort of thing you were looking for? If it is then I can do a free symbol pack here on the forum, but it may have to wait for more pressing projects to be completed first. That might be several weeks.

Hello MoonBrew :)

You can learn a lot about CC3 by watching a few of our Live Stream recordings available here on Profantasy's channel:

We are having another one this evening if you want to come along and have a look. It's at the top of that list.

Animated water maps aren't possible in CC just yet, but there is a very recent underwater style I've just finished working on (this style is not included in the current bundle). Here is an example map extract.

I think you should be able to use the cutting doors and windows anyway, as long as you copied the properties of the sample wall and used them. It's all about which layer the walls are on.

I cut this circle I drew with a regular cutting door symbol after I converted it to a path using "Line to path" in the right click menu of the Fractalize button. Looking back I can see I forgot to mention the conversion.

If you treat the smooth walls the same way they should also cut.

And in fact I've just tried it and discovered that you don't even need to convert them. Both Circle and smooth line should cut, but they must be on the same sheet and layer as the walls drawn by the regular wall drawing tools.

The forests still aren't finished, but what do you think of everything else so far?

And a little more...