Best Way to Map Real World England in CC3

[Mouse]

Thanks Waldronate

That's a useful one for future use

[EpicBradley129]

Ok, so I made a map. It's prob not a very good map, but it is a map. At this point I prob could just use it as is, except for all the things that kinda suck about it. I'm posting the JPEG image export of the map here to get some feedback on how I can improve the map.

I was actually looking for a place on this forum to post nearly-finished-but-not-quite maps, and I didn't see anywhere that looked appropriate. Is there any place to post mostly-finished maps in need of touch ups, where I can get community advice on improving those maps? I should note that I did see the "Finished Maps" forum, but that seems to me to be a place to post completely finished maps that need no significant revisions. Is that impression accurate?

Anyway, the biggest question I have about this map is, is it legible? Can you tell what the map is showing and can you tell what each individual map element is? Additionally, in terms of style, I was going for a simple, hand-drawn look - mostly because I wasn't sure I could make anything more complicated and also because I essentially was drawing it by hand. Does this map capture that hand-drawn feel at all or does it just look noob-ish?

Beyond those question, the issues I see in this map are:

1. First of all, the area I actually need to map out is all in the very southern part of England, and right now I'm showing the coastline for the southern half of England, so the important parts of my map are actually smushed into a pretty small area, which can make some elements, especially smaller text, hard to see/read. And if it's hard for me to see, it's prob really hard for other people to see. The problem is that I want to show enough of the coastline so that the map is immediately recognizable as England, but maybe that's not worth making all the roads and rivers too hard to see. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this? Should I prioritize enlarging the map elements over making the geographic location of those map elements immediately clear?
2. Second, as you can see at the top of the map, I have a box with road names in it. I didn't want to put those road names by the actual roads because of the issues with space I talked about above. In the JPEG image, the box is too small for some reason, but I drew it the right size in CC3+. So why did the box suddenly get smaller? How do I keep it the right size when I export the map? Also, is putting the road names in a box in empty space the best fix for my space issue? Is there a better way to handle this?
3. Third, as you can see CC3+ exported my map with some extraneous stuff around it that I don't want. This is not a huge deal because I can just crop the image in my photo editor, but it is kinda annoying. Most annoying of all is the border around the map extending above and below where the parchment background actually ends. Originally, the parchment background filled that entire border, covering up those white strips at the top and bottom of the border/box. Then I brought the top of the border down and the bottom of the border up with the "Numeric Edit" tool, b/c reasons, but immediately after I did that the border snapped back to where it was originally and left the parchment background at the heights I had put the border top/bottom. That might be confusing, but the gist of it is I want the border to hug the parchment background; how do I do that? This again is not a huge deal b/c I can just crop the image to cut out that white space.

Also, is there a way to increase the resolution of the image exports to make the lines crisper and the smaller text easier to read?

[Mouse]

The Finished Maps forum is for finished maps. I would start a new thread in one of the Work In Progress forums (WIP forums) - probably here in the Regional/World Mapping section.

Most of the problems you outline above can be resolved by learning how to export the jpg a different way.

Here is how I would do it:

1. Decide how big I want my map to be. Say for the sake of my imaginary example I wanted it to be 5000 pixels wide by 3000 pixels tall.
2. Show the grid by clicking the grid button at the bottom right, and turn snap on.
3. Draw a hollow fill rectangle around the area of the map that matters to me - the bit where things are happening - making sure that the exact proportions of that rectangle are 5:3. In other words if the bottom of the rectangle is 10 grid squares I would want the side to be 6 grid squares tall.
4. Save the map
5. From the menu use File/Save as and where it says "Campaign Cartographer 3 FCW Drawing", change the type to "Rectangular Section JPEG"
6. Click the options button and set the maximum image dimensions to width 5000, and height 3000.
7. Check the Antialias option and set that at about 20%, but be careful to reduce that figure if the true image dimensions exceed 10,000 pixels in either direction, or CC3 will crash on export. 10,000 pixels square is the largest bitmap you can export.
8. Click ok, give the export file a name, and click Save.
9. Nothing will seem to happen, but that is because you need to check the command line for instructions. It should now be asking you to "Pick first corner", so you click just once on the bottom left hand corner of the rectangle you drew earlier on your map - relying on the snap function to line that click up exactly with the corner of the rectangle.
10. The command line should now be asking you to "Pick Second Corner", and you should click the top right hand corner of the bounding rectangle you drew.
11. The instant you click the second corner a DOS window will open showing you the progress of the export. The first time this happened to me I nearly had a heart attack. It does look for an instant like the programme is crashing, but trust me - it isn't. This is normal behaviour.
12. When the export is done the DOS window will automatically disappear, and if you check in the folder where you told CC3 to save your exported map you should have a brand new jpg image of the exact dimensions you specified, showing the exact extent of the rectangle you decided to export from your map.

[Mouse]

The other thing is that CC3 maps are never the finished product. The CC3 file is like the workshop, complete with all the scaffolding and support struts. The JPEG export is the finished map, so it really doesn't matter at all about things sticking out around the edges. Please don't worry about these things.

Once you have mastered exporting the rectangular section JPEG you will realise that having things sticking outside the frame in the CC3 file is really neither here nor there

[EpicBradley129]

Wow, that worked beautifully. Yeah, so I should definitely look through the user manual to figure all this stuff out myself... over the summer. No time right now, but it definitely pays to know how to actually use this program.

So only one more thing before I post this map to the WIP forum: the lines I drew on this map come out very faint. Should I just make them thicker in CC3+ so they'll appear normally in the JPEG image, or is there some other issue here that I have to address?

[Mouse]

That's a lot better, though I think you may need to adjust the pixel height and width settings in the option box to represent the proportions of the rectangle you drew on the map a bit, since you shouldn't really be able to see any of the edges of the rectangle you used to demark the chosen area.

Now then. Down to the thin coastline issue...

You could just make the line thicker by using the change properties tool, but if you have any really sharp angles on that coastline anywhere at all it may create undesirable artefacts in the form of spurs that go shooting off into the distance at a tangent to the actual line. And because the tracing is so fine I would say there is a very high chance of that being the case.

Try it and see what happens, and if it doesn't work give me a shout. There is another much more complicated way of sorting this out.

I think I should add here that taking short cuts by not reading the manual and learning how to use the software before you started on this project is causing you an awful lot of unnecessary hard work, and that it might have been quicker to do things the other way around. It certainly isn't all that easy for me, either, since every time I make a suggestion I have to remember that you aren't going to necessarily understand what I'm going on about

[Mouse]

Something else you can try instead of making the line thicker if that doesn't turn out well...

You can increase the contrast between the drawing and the background by adding a Hue, Saturation, Lightness Sheet Effect to the sheet you have the parchment on. Do that and edit the effect to increase the lightness quite a bit, so that the background isn't so dark. The coastline will then stand out more clearly.