1" = 5 feet = 1 grid square.

That's a pretty good first map :)

The next stage is to start playing with the sheet effects like the shadows to see what different results you can get. For example, those smaller shadows are a lot sharper than the taller ones on the trees. Maybe they could do with a little more blur on them?

While a glance suggests they are ok, they are a little dated.

You might be interested in this series of videos by Remy Monsen.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLulP-cGMLxw4qTpXfilRHgbDUg8WvrEX2

I would use a mixture. Use the harder style for the rocks, and the softer style for the trees. But that's only what I would do.

Lovely work :)

@Wyvern I sat here for nearly a minute trying to work out where pentagonal igloos came into the equation, and then suddenly realised you were talking about the separate dormer window symbols I pasted into the area where I'm laying out all the symbols I've done so far! LOL! I'm not surprised you weren't sure about them. I didn't even know I'd drawn any igloos...

But... I can eventually - when I've sorted out the conversion of the existing buildings.

@JulianDracos Yes - eventually, though not yet. I've some work to do to get to where I'm inventing new stuff. There is quite a lot of maths involved this time, and I've never been very good at that. For example, it took 3 days to work out the map file for the dormer windows (below). This little graphic, which isn't even visible in the map, but which controls the way the dormer window is lit, is made up of over 20 blended layers of red and blue - all in the name of getting a smooth transition between the dormer window and the rooftop.

I can paint, draw, and even sculpt reasonable looking trees out of wire and modelling clay, but I'm still crap at watercolour.

You, on the other hand, are great at it - even when there are no actual watercolours in sight :)

Well, having settled on a design for the thatched cottages, I now have to decide how to do the tiled cottages.

Where the thatched cottages had a handy herringbone decoration I could use to add interest to the buildings, the tiled ones have nothing other than the tiles. I've already tried using something from the tile texture and it just looked a mess, so I'm wondering now if the lumpy snow look will be enough. The part building at the top of this shot is one of the thatched buildings, while the one at the bottom is a prototype tiled house. It's a bit scruffy around the edges and the chimney hasn't been cut out of the map file so it's too bright, but I do those things when I've finished the design.

The question here is one of the required amount of detail. Does it have enough to make it interesting?

Well, I had a go with combining what I did with the original tiled house. It's not great - mainly because the map files are quite different and the combination was a crude mask that erased some of the snowy version and its map file to reveal the original house underneath it. The map file for the tiled version is very steep. The map file for the snowy version is very shallow - so that the snow doesn't bleach out to being completely white all over. There are a few strange patches you can see on the darker parts of the roof to the south where the resulted blended map file is neither one thing or another.

Let me know what you think.

@JulianDracos - I live in an area with plenty of thatched buildings, and since thatch is one of the greenest roofing materials available that isn't likely to change very much. It is also about 10 times more insulating than tiles unless you have excellent insulation in the attic space of a tiled house. So the snow does tend to stick and stay much better on thatched cottages than it does on tiled houses. It's therefore not inconceivable that you would get some wind erosion of the snow on tiled rooftops and/or melt off. The tiles are warmer because they don't keep the heat in as well as thatch does.

The other question I have is: does the snow melt into tidy sharp-edged patches, or is there a blend like I've created above where the snow shades out gradually into a melted patch?

Hi Everyone! :D

In tomorrow's Live Mapping session Ralf will be discussing contour shading - what it is, what it brings to a map, and how to add it in a Campaign Cartographer 3+ map.

Come along and join in, or watch later :)

Use List in the Info menu to find out how many nodes you have in that large landmass. It's the node count that really slows CC3 down. over 10,000 is where it starts to get slow, while 30,000 is nearly impossible to work with. But do you really need that many? In most cases, not really.

If you can get away with it without losing something important, use SIMPLIFY to get rid of unnecessary nodes. Even if you use a very small factor with SIMPLIFY, it will still get rid of any nodes that are right on top of each other and not really doing much because they are too close to make any difference.

Fractalise is a high risk tool to use. If you use it too many times all you end up doing is making the coastline frilly and CC3 slow, neither of which are good things. I don't recommend fractalising anything large more than twice with the default settings and definitely no more than 3 times. You also have to consider that however many nodes you end up with in the coastline you will double that if you then trace the coastline with all your terrain fills.

If you want to be able to edit and trace your coastline, use a colour key for the central ocean instead of multipolying the two parts. A multipoly can't be traced, edited, or fractalised.