My World of Larysia

[Tonnichiwa]

I'm very glad I could help Now I'm really looking forward to seeing your maps up close.

[Bogie]

Nice looking maps, looking forward to seeing the larger ones.

[ladiestorm]

Okay, Ive resized my maps, so hopefully everyone can see them better! Let's give this a shot...

[Tonnichiwa]

Thanks Ladiestorm for posting your maps so we can see them. Your world sounds like it would be an awesome game world to play in. I really love the concept. That said, I do like your maps and as you thought, I do see room for improvement. You said you won't be changing them but that you still wanted feedback on them so that is what I will do. Please note that nothing I say is a dig at you or your work. It is just areas to watch out for next time so you can make maps that I think you will like better than these.

So first I will talk about rivers. Rivers always flow down the point of least resistance and rarely split to become two rivers. Instead, in almost every case, rivers join up to create bigger rivers. Also, they usually do not go from flat lands, then through mountainous regions, then back to flat lands again. They also will usually only split if they are in a delta area.

Second, I noticed some of your trees were placed on top of trees so they look a bit unnatural. It took me a while to get the hang of placing trees right too. Basically, learning to place the symbols properly is something that everyone struggles with at first. If you don't place them right, they can sometimes overlap and look very unnatural to outright bad. I actually had to re-do an entire forest in my Blackwing world simply because I placed one tree wrong and it messed up every other tree in the entire forest. That was a pain, but it was worth it when I fixed it. The method for placing trees is start at the top of the map and work your way down, never going back up unless you are placing trees far enough away from other symbols that they won't overlap.

Third is the placement of towers and buildings and things like that. Often I have found placing buildings in Campaign Cartographer can be hard depending on the style used. Some styles do not really seem to blend in with their surroundings much and often will look like they are hovering over something or were not quite placed at the exact spot on the map that would make them look like they belong there.

I have found that I really have to think about each and every symbol as I place it for the map to turn out right. And sometimes it just doesn't. When that happens it always has me re-thinking if I want to use that particular style anymore. But there comes a point where you just have to use what you have and hope for the best. In those situations it always pays to be careful with symbol placement, watching how every symbol you place reacts with it's surroundings. Ask yourself if it looks right in the place you put it. What I will always do is zoom in really close to see what it looks like and to see if other symbols will interfere with placement, and I will also zoom way out to see how the symbols will react with each other. Sometimes they work, other times they don't. If they don't I tend to remove them and re-think where I can place it for best effect.

Fourth is placement of bitmap fills. I have found that if I am not careful, I will place a bitmap fill over an obvious symbol, for instance a bitmap fill of a bush over a crevasse. So it makes the bush look as if it is hovering over the crevasse. I try to avoid doing that if I can by messing with the sheets and effects. In the case of the crevasse, I would have created a new sheet and put the offending crevasse or the offending bush bitmap fill on it, then maneuvered the sheet around so that the crevasse goes over the bitmap of the bush, thus creating the illusion of the crevasse being real, instead of ending up with floating bushes everywhere.

Anyway, those are a few helpful hints for your next maps. I hope you will not take offense to anything I have written here as it is completely meant in the spirit of trying to help you become a better mapper with cc3 and cc3+.

Cheers.

[ladiestorm]

No, tonnichiwa, I take no offense at all! Some of the things you mentioned, I didn't even notice, like the overlapping trees. I totally missed that! I did do a lot of zooming in and out as.I drew this map. So let me address your issues and pick your brain a bit

When I said I won't be changing these maps, that's essentially true. I won't be changing THESE maps. I do reserve the right to redraw them once I learn more about what I can, and can't do in cc3+.

That being said, let's address the issues you found. And we will start with the great river debate . As I said before, even if(when) I redraw these maps... The screwed up rivers is one 'mistake' I will be keeping, because that mistake is story driven. I don't know enough about cc3+ yet (and probably don't have the add one I need) to show the world as accurately as I would like. Think of a world that has been ravaged by wars and ripped open by the fury of the gods. Earth quakes ripping open, the slamming closed. Volcanoes rising, erupting, then sinking back below the Earth's surface, all in a matter of days, or weeks. Harmless plants and animals mutating into horrible creatures...the very fabric of the world being ripped and shattered. That's what happened here a thousand years ago.

I don't know enough yet to make my base land masses look so broken and uneven. And I probably need a few annuals to do what I want, which I can't afford right now . I might could have used mountain symbols, sized really low to show shards of earth erupting out in strange places....hmmm might have to think about that. Is there a way to use sheets and effects on the symbols? A thought for later...

Okay... The trees. Yup, I totally missed the fact that some of my trees were overlapping. I probably could have avoided that if I had used the forest terrain fill... But I didn't want to do that, because I didn't want my forests looking so full. I was also trying to have the forests climbing part way up my mountain ranges...that's something to keep in mind for next time, so thank you very much for catching it!

My settlements and towers and stuff. I'm assuming you are referring to the ones that are in the .mountains? If so, I understand what you're saying... Not sure how to fix it. How do you place settlements, towers temples ànd such in a mountain ranges without them looking like they're floating?
I had originally spaced my mountains out a bit, so that places like that were in mountain valleys, but someone else .mentioned that they needed to be closer together, so that they were in a range, and not so soltary. Anyone have any ideas?

Lastly, the terrain fills. I have to admit, I totally goofed on those... Mostly because some types of terrain fills should be placed BEFORE the symbols that show the crevasses, but I didn't think about using them until after. Which just goes to show you should really THINK about the map you are making before you start to draw it. It also shows that your should learn the program you are using before you try to use it on a large scale. Which is what I'm doing now. I finally got the tome and I'm going through it step by step to learn all the things cc3+ can do.

But i n the interim, does anyone else have suggestions to improve my mapping?

[waldronate]

One thing that might help with the overlapping symbols is to select them and use the SYMSORT command (which you may already have done). This command will sort the selected symbols so that they flow from top to bottom in the drawing. If you're lucky on the insertion points for the symbols, trees will overlap onto villages and mountains will flow in an orderly manner.