If you want ideas on how to map huge areas of forest you could try watching the last few Live Mapping sessions, where Ralf has very nearly completed his Mirkwood map. That's really dense forest as well.

The very general idea is to add the large are in patches and add little features such as thinly covered hills or larger than average trees here and there. Towards the end of the video Ralf uses Symbols in area as well as the standard forest drawing tools.

EXPORTSETMPPP

Try typing the same figure as you are given at the command line with an extra zero on the end of it, and hit Enter.

This week Ralf will be presenting the Banners & Seals symbol pack from the Cartographer's Annual 2021. As part of the process he will also be explaining catalogue settings and how to create them, so it is well worth coming along to see how it is done.

You can visit Youtube and book a reminder by clicking the link above.

Hi Simon :)

Both are good looking maps, though I recommend getting rid of the drop shadow on the text on the first top view map for the sake of clarity.

If this is an ebook you should really check what they both look like when they are reduced to the correct resolution for publication. Check in particular if the labels are legible.

If they are for a printed book (and unless the book is going to be printed in full colour), I recommend printing both of them the correct size in black and white to see what they look like. You might find that a black and white style is more appropriate in that case.

When you open the palette there are two rows at the top that can't be edited. The rest of the palette can be edited just by picking one of them and clicking Define Color.

If you set one of the editable colours as your knockout colour and then edit that colour in the palette at a later date the polygons of that colour will become the new shade, but the colour in the Color Key will remain the same. That means the knockout will no longer work.

That's why the default knockout colour for the Color Key effect is colour number 6 - the magenta in the top row of the palette.

That's another way of doing it I think, and there are many alternatives.

I made an example file using DD3 to show what I described above if you would like to have it.

The water is the background polygon, and the dirt is a polygon on the FLOORS sheet that extends beyond the edge of the map to hide the bevel where it appears on the outside edge as well as the edge of the crevice. If you hide the sheet called SCREEN you will see what I mean about hiding that outer edge.

I added 3 effects to the FLOORS sheet and drew the magenta cut out shape on that sheet. The first two effects were as I described above, and the third was a glow to enhance the illusion of there being a shadow cast on the water below by the edges of the crevice.

Hi Everyone :)

Tomorrow's Live Mapping session will start an hour earlier than the usual time, so please be careful not to miss it if you want to catch it live.

Ralf will be demonstrating how you can create your own custom style in Campaign Cartographer 3+.

We would love to see you there :)

I'm late! Oh dear.

I'm also pretty crazy, so I've picked one of the largest remaining buildings - the Town Hall and Tax Office.

Click the little text box in the bar at the top where it says "FS:...."

A dialog called Fill Style Properties will open. Make sure the Bitmap Files tab is active and pick the fill you want to rescale from the dropdown box called Fill Style Name.

Make sure the Scaled checkbox near the bottom of the dialog is checked and adjust the Width and Height of the fill in map units.

In this screen shot the fill I have picked is scaled to 15 x 15 map units.

Click OK and the fill should rescale itself in the map.

Sometimes there are second parts for the same style, like there was for the Spectrum Overland style I did last year, but it is less common for there to be an overland/dungeon style pair.

There's a scale between those two things anyway - city scale. Going straight from Overland to Dungeon scale while completely missing out City scale doesn't make sense. And since doing 3 issues of 12 in exactly the same overall style would mean dedicating 1/4 of the entire annual to just one basic style (which not everyone will be interested in) this is very unlikely to happen.

However, if enough people show an interest in a grimdark dungeon style and can show me what this actually means... There was never really an actual style for Grimdark as far as I am aware, but only a sense of atmosphere... that could be something that might appear at some point in time.

...

I had an idea for a compass I thought you all might like