It had been almost a year since I treated myself to the CC3+ bundle, and wrote my initial impressions post. Since then, with one thing and another making demands on my time I just didn't get around to doing much with it, mainly due to the investment of time in learning how to use it that it was clearly going to require.
Recently, I did manage to find a weekend to play around with it again. I wanted to produce a digital version of some crude hand-drawn maps of a region of my setting in which a sub-campaign has arisen. This is a heavily wooded area (it's in the Dreadwood, for the benefit of those familiar with the Greyhawk setting), so there were really going to be rather a lot of trees.
CC3 is like a CAD package rather than photo-editing and I have never gotten on with CAD software, and CC3 is no exception. If I can slog up the learning curve the advantages should in theory outweigh the disads.
My starting point was a rather dull but essential ~15 part YouTube tutorial. Then to crack on with my own map.
Some things about CC3 are a giant arse-ache. The most difficult part, is when you have to change something after you've placed it. Selecting and transforming objects is really hard work compared with a photoediting package. Since my old PC was retired along with Corel Photopaint I've had to grapple with learning how to do stuff in GIMP. After a laborious weekend with CC3, I'll never complain about the non-usability of GIMP again!
Often, the only way to select an object that's been placed in an area dense with other stuff is to isolate the layer it's on, hide all the other layers, and then select it. This is made much harder by the fact that there seems to be no simple way to, say, right-click an object and have a dialog box pop up with an option to list the layers and sheets it is on, and there is a lot of trial and error involved.
If you don't get an object right first time it's often less work to Ctrl-Z and just do the damn thing all over again than it is to change it. I think I am gradually getting to grips with its idiosyncrasies. There are probably ways to make life easier working with it that I haven't found out yet. Not one for "map-making in a hurry" though.
I think the results weren't too disappointing given that it's my first real mapping project in CC3+. This is a low-res version of the region I've completed so far. The whole Dreadwood is much larger but other bits of the overall map are still a work in progress.
This map is for the benefit of the players, so there's plenty of hidden features of the area not shown on this one.
The scale bar, I just couldn't get to work properly and should be disregarded. Hexes are 7.5 miles.
 |
| Dreadwood - Camp Ragfried Environs Map, with 7.5 mile hexes |
So, that was that.
Some Facts About Hexagons
Today, I returned to my mapping efforts with Campaign Cartographer, and I was immediately reminded of how non-intuitive the program feels to someone who usually works with raster graphics. Despite having spent a whole weekend on it quite recently, on firing it up again I struggled to accomplish anything and was spitting in frustration. "How are you supposed to select anything?" In pretty much every graphics package I've used before there is a Select tool. It took me a little while to recall that in CC3+, you decide what you want to do first and pick the tool for the operation; then it prompts you to select something. Anyway, hopefully with regular visits to CC3+ the old dog will eventually learn these new tricks.
The order of the day this time was to explore how to expand maps once they've initially been created, to add new territory. I also wanted to tinker around with hex grids and implement a scalable, layered hex scheme in which each hex can be broken down into a pattern of smaller hexes.
The standard 1st-edition Greyhawk campaign map hex is 30 miles. (I believe they dialed this down to 12 miles in later editions, but as our campaign converted up from 1e to 3.5e we've retained many 1st edition conceits). However in more detailed area maps we use smaller hexes. Now when I made my Dreadwood map recently, I was thinking that each 30 mile hex would break down so it has 3 smaller hexagons to a side, so would be 5 small hexes wide at its widest point and 4 small hexes would be the distance from centre-side to centre-side, i.e. the average width of the hexagon, which meant that it would be 4 small hexes to 30 miles. Which would make my small hexes 7.5 miles each. So this is the hex scale I used for the Dreadwood map.
In doing this, I was forgetting some basic hex geometry. I discovered my mistake when I tried to overlay a 30-mile hex grid on my 7.5 mile hex map in order to provide a structure to transpose into from the classic Darlene Greyhawk Campaign Map. The big hexes wouldn't align with the smaller hex grid across the whole map. It took me a little while to realise my mistake.
To break a big hex down to small hexes in the way I'd envisaged required a 90 degree rotation of the hex grid - vertical hexes rather than horizontal ones. This meant that the "4 small hexes wide equals 30 miles" logic didn't work. Instead to determine the size of the small hexes I had to consider the distance from centre hex to the centre of another hex two hexes away and divide that by 6 (the number of small hexes between the centre points). The distance across two hexes involved a bit of trigonometry, and a factor of Cosine(30 degrees) was involved. So in the end the formula was X = (Y/3) * Cos(30), where X is the small hex spacing and Y is the large hex spacing.
This means that the hex size of a small hex in this scheme should be 8.66 miles, not 7.5 miles. So a re-issue of the Dreadwood map with slightly larger "small" hexes will have to ensue (not that this makes much difference to what people have done so far on that map).
 |
| 30-mile hex grid with 8.66-mile grid overlay |
So much for the 30 mile scheme. But I also wanted a hex grid with smaller than 8.66 mile hexes for more detailed sub maps. Armed with my formula, it was easy to determine that the hex grid scale for the next level of detail would be 2.5 miles per hex.
I was able to overlay a 30-mile grid and an 8.66 mile grid together on my Dreadwood map (its boundaries much enlarged to take in many other surrounding territories of interest on the Greyhawk map). This was pushing the limit of what CC3+ could comfortably handle on my PC, hex grids require FLOPS to generate accurate coordinates for and rasterise onto the monitor and I suspect CC3+ does not utilise the machine's GPU, or possibly other advanced features like pipelining (I feel as if the codebase of the engine is a little archaic with lots of features layered on top). Attempting to overlay the 2.5 mile hex grid on the whole map as well proved too much and CC3+ crashed out entirely when I tried to move the 2.5 mile grid to get it lined up nicely with the 8.66 mile grid.
 |
| Extended Area Map - with 30 mile and 8.66 mile global grids, and a localised 2.5 mile grid |
I would probably only use a 2.5 mile or finer grid for specific local maps, though. Now that I have the hang of creating new hex grids and getting them lined up I can add those ad hoc to specific map regions when they are needed.
 |
| Showing localised 2.5 mile grid (cream) overlaid on the Camp Ragfried Environs map |
Having three (or more) grids can make things look quite crowded though, and when generating maps for player consumption I would only display the relevant grid scale and hide the others. They are mainly there to aid me in making sure I correctly transcribe between maps such as the Darlene map from the original Greyhawk box set, or the Anna B Meyer maps, or our own homebrew (and sometimes non-canonical) maps.
 |
| Oaken Heart region showing the three grid layers: 30 mile (red), 8.66 mile (grey), 2.5 mile (cream) |
 |
| A clearer view of the 3-layer hex grid scheme |
The next level down from 2.5 miles would be 0.7217 miles, and the level down from that would be 0.2083 miles (1100 feet); should I wish to produce a map to that sort of granularity for an outdoor adventure that would be hex-compatible with my larger scale maps.
No comments:
Post a Comment