Color key doesn't generally work on symbols because of the way symbols are drawn twice by the rendering engine.

The only exception to this rule are 'mapped' city symbols (building roofs that shade themselves according to the position of the global sun), which are only drawn once to preserve the roof shading.

You can copy the png file for the symbol and delete the parts you don't want in the new copy in a bitmap editor, then use your modified copies instead, but be careful to remember they are modified symbols and shouldn't be gifted to anyone else. Using them in your own maps for all the usual purposes, including commercial sale of the map, is fine.

There is really only one big drawback when making your own versions of the public set, and that is if you share your FCW file with others they will only see red X's where they don't have the necessary artwork.

Sorry! I give you a thumbs up for thanking Remy, but when I reconsidered I realised it might have looked like I was agreeing that your work was rubbish. It's NOT rubbish. So I took back my thumbs up.

I've always found that the way to start a new style is to get the textures right. With this style the colours are more or less already dictated by the fact that they must be similar to the overland style. That just leaves me with the task of getting the actual texture correct.

Here is a first shot at the 4 grass textures. Those are Bitmap A buildings for a sense of scale. The Darklands ones will be nowhere near as clean and well maintained. The grass is probably long grass, but then - who is going to mow the grass in a Darklands City?

They look good to me :)

I am a little concerned about the way the grey tone one will turn out in print. This style isn't designed specifically for BW reproduction and may look a little flat unless the printing quality and the paper are both pretty good. Try printing it out on paper of similar quality first. If it looks bad, try increasing the contrast a little, or even using a tone curve on it in a bitmap editor.

When you install the update you will probably get a message that tells you you have a newer version installed. If you do, just ignore it and carry on installing the update.

Stage 1

I exploded the land polygon because as an export from FT3 it was automatically a 'multipoly', which means you can't edit it or trace it. Then I hid the land and trimmed that black line down to just the wiggly side so I could see what I was doing.

As a side note to that simplified instruction - although I had picked the properties of the land before I exploded it, so that the exploded polygons would have the same properties as the original multipoly, they had a line width greater than zero, so became outlines rather than solid polygons. I put that matter right using Change Properties on all the bits of land to reset the line width to zero.

Stage 2

Next (and because I'm not great at using the editing facility of drawing tools) I decided to use the Land, Default drawing tool to trace the original landmass, breaking off the tracing at either end of that wiggly black line and tracing that instead of the original coastline in that area to close the polygon. The default land drawing tool uses a different fill colour to your original land mass, which is coincidentally convenient to show the result.

I then deleted the original landmass, hid the black line, changed the colour of the newly traced landmass to match the rest, and picked out the lakes in solid magenta (colour 6).

Another side note here. FT exports are notoriously full of far too many nodes, which makes the drawing sluggish. Since this map has only just begun I used the SIMPLIFY keyboard command at a distance of 5 units (you are prompted for the setting in the command line), which greatly improved the responsiveness of the drawing.

The reason for turning the lakes magenta is to use an alternative method for drawing them so that you don't have to re-multipoly the land. If you look I have added a new sheet effect to the land sheet called a Color Key. The Color Key knockout colour is magenta, so where the lakes are magenta they will become holes in the land when the sheet effects are turned on, like this.

Other adjustments I made to speed up the drawing just a bit were to change the units of the LAND sheet effects to 'map units' and switch off one of the glow effects. You may find it faster to work with effects off in this very large map unless you really need them on to see what you are doing.

The full process was quite involved, so I've uploaded the end result if you want it here.

It is amazingly detailed :)

Those mountains are good. Where did you get them?

In this week's live mapping session (Thursday 8 May) Ralf will be demonstrating the most recent Annual issue; Hand Drawn Fantasy, by Ralf Schemmann, and taking the time to show us how to convert our own hand-drawn images into CC3+ symbols.

Come along and join in the chat live on YouTube here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_igjMH_1lc

Or watch it later either on YouTube or here on the forum:*

*This thread isn't monitored during the live show, but you can put any questions you may have after watching it on this thread (or even the ones you think about before the event if you wish).

I think it might be a bit too massive in nature.

You have two huge mountainous regions, the smallest of which is probably the size of Africa. You might want to have a look at just how many mountain ranges there are in the combined area of Earth's landmasses, and maybe rethink those bulky summits.

There's a map on this link that shows the mountainous areas of Earth in red. It's a bit psychedelic, but the colours are as close as I could find to the colour scheme you are using for your map. Remember that the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica account for the red in those areas, and you will see that very little of the real world is actually mountain, and that those mountain ranges are much more linear in nature and relatively short (with the obvious exception of the Andes and Rockies).

I think its possible that the way to go from here is to worry first about breaking up those masses by levelling wide troughs through them so that they really do end up on one side of the continent or the other. That will automatically make your world look like it is much larger.

The easiest way to do that with least fuss is to activate the prescale offset editing, and use only the prescale raise and lower brushes (the green ones) set large and very low powered. These brushes cause less damage to the underlying fractal. I assume you have The One Day Worldbuilder, since I think that is one of the colour schemes that comes with CA155, so this is probably a repeat of information you already have ;)

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone :)

Actually, Quenten... They might have been adjusted a little since this composite screen shot was made just after the last image in this thread, but....