Thank you for sharing all your favourite overland styles and giving me a little information about why they are your favourites. This was a very enlightening thread for me. I hope it was for you too.

This thread is to show the development of CC4 Overland, or as much as might be interesting to you. It's also an opportunity for you to express your thoughts on how it's going and make suggestions about improvements. Not all suggestions will necessarily be incorporated, but they will all be seriously considered.

So far, I've started with the textures. The initial Land texture I showed a glimpse of in the thread linked above ended up being too busy for it's own good, so it was dumbed down quite considerably to be more of a subtle blotchy background for the more important stuff - the terrain textures and symbols to come. There's also a draft ocean texture.

I usually start by doing all the textures first, but I've also been thinking about the mountains, hills, mesas, craters, etc. I needed good reference material and a way to keep my drawings consistent, so I used Blender to create models for myself.

There is a landscape add on available in Blender, but it doesn't provide the right options for me to get what I wanted, so I made my own set of geometry nodes. I know there are other Blender enthusiasts among you, so here are the nodes for the mountains if you want to have a go at making one of your own. I've scrunched them all up as close as I can so you can read them.

And here are the variables for the active mountain (outlined orange above). My spelling is still really bad. 'Aplitude' is meant to be 'Amplitude'.

Now begins the long process of hand drawing the mountains based on the models I've just made.

Please feel free to comment and make suggestions.

I never use fractal tracing tools. Straight line ones are faster and follow the fractal original just as well because a fractal line is just a straight line with a few displaced nodes it.

EDIT: I've learned there is no actual speed difference between a fractal drawing tool and a straight line drawing tool when tracing. They behave the same. So personal perception also plays a part in this.

I thought that as well when I went looking, but then I checked the Mapping Guide and found this:

"...Choose the map type Perspective and the option Pick a pre-defined Template..."

It's there. You just have to pick the pre-defined Template option at the bottom of the first dialog.

Hi Ryan, and welcome to the forum :)

This is a good start to your project. You've asked for a few pointers, so here are my main ones:

Symbol scale.

I notice you have varied the size of the symbols, particularly the trees and/or structures (the towns/cities/villages etc) to relate to each other in a more realistic world scale - a bit like you might if you were making a dungeon map, or an artistic picture map that is also a kind of concept image of the world. However, this has left you with structures that are pretty hard to identify for what they are. I recommend that you consider making the structures at least twice the size they currently are so that people looking at the map can see the difference between (for instance) a walled city and a city without a wall. Remember that when you are mapping at this kind of scale the structures are symbolic rather than realistic depictions, so a city might well be 100 miles across according to the map scale, but it's centre is in the right place and you can see what it is without squinting at it.

That leads me to the next thing. You really need a scale bar - perhaps somewhere to the bottom left.

Placing a scale bar.

Turn on the snap grid (the button called SNAP in the bottom right corner of the window), and click the Borders/Political button |CC2BO| in the top bar to access the cartouches (scale bars, compasses etc). Pick the scale bar you want and hover over the map. Right click anywhere you like before you place the scale bar, and hit the Set normal button, and then the More button.

This will give you a scale bar that is the correct length according to it's name, and a way to place it neatly in the map so that labelling it is relatively easy.

Title and compass

In some of that ocean you might want to add a title and a compass?

...

I hope that helps :)

If the CSUAC folder and catalogue structure follows the same convention as the Profantasy ones, the folder containing the png should be in the same parent folder as the catalogue, and may even bear the same name.

Alternatively, if you open the Symbol Manager and pick the symbol you want to find the png for, then hit the List button, it should give you the location and filename of the png on the 9th line.