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.

Speed depends a lot on how many nodes you have in the object you are tracing (and also in the map as a whole). Maybe use SIMPLIFY first?

It would be nice to have better tracing tools, but for now we have what we have.

@kilma.ard.venom I spent my first 2 years with CC3+ only using the default overland styles. At the time I couldn't afford any of the Annuals, but these days I've got them all. There are many very beautiful overland styles available, but the strange thing is that quite apart from not really having a lot of time to make maps, when I do overland maps I tend to automatically pick the original default CC3+ overland styles - probably just because those are the first styles I ever learned how to use.

@Royal Scribe Yes, we do it a lot in city and dungeon styles, but never really provide alternative shades in overland styles. Maybe it's time.

Thanks for the answers so far everyone! Very useful.

If this is a map for a whole country you probably need an overland mapping style. CC3 comes with a small collection of default styles. If you click the New Map |CC2NEW|button, pick the Overland Maps type and the Decide settings myself option, the Next dialog you get will reveal which overland styles you currently have available.

I've been here for years and have all the overland styles, but if you are only just starting you may only have a one or two. One of them will be the CC3 Mike Schley Overland style, which is one of the most flexible and useful mapping styles we have.

Pick your choice of style and click Next, which will take you to a window where you will have settings you can make, such as for the size of the map you want.

If this is the first map you have made I recommend watching this live mapping video. The sound track is a bit messed up before the start point I have given you a couple of minutes in.