Advice on setting up CC3 for scaling tp FG

[poobah_1]

So I went and bought CC3 (Campaign Carto 3) and I love the maps it makes.

I have a few questions that I was hoping someone on the forums has had experience with.

1) What is the best initial setting for map size in CC3 in order to eventually get it to scale correctly for FG? (100 x 100 with a 10.0000 on the square size?)
2) What is best export setting in order to capture all the sheet effects that are available in CC3?

If anyone has experience in creating maps in CC3 and then getting those maps to scale correctly and look great in FG, please let me know

Regards

SM

[ddavison]

I believe they added a save option for Fantasy Grounds to CC3 that sets squares at 50 pixels per square. This is a pretty standard size. You also want to try to keep the overall file size down as low as possible to help with the speed of deploying the maps to the players in game. I generally try to keep them at 1 MB or less and find that I can still maintain a good quality and a good speed.

[Trenloe]

1) Go with whatever settings are right for the map you're creating. So, you'll need to think ahead of how big your end map is going to be and go with those settings - perhaps a little larger to make sure you'll fit everything in.

Assuming you're making a dungeon/structure map: for grid size (during map making), go with the main width of corridors - if all of your corridors will be 10' wide then a grid set at 10' will be good. But, on average, I find the standard 5' grid with 2 snap points works well for me.

Don't put a physical grid on your map - you'll do that in FG. Although a lot of mappers put a square off to the side somewhere for grid size and alignment purposes. See the black square in the top right of this map as an example:

14358

2) I export (Save As) from CC3 as a PNG bitmap file with the width/height calculated based on the size of the squares I want on my final map and the dimensions of the map I created. So, if I created a 200' x 200' map and I wanted 50 pixels per 5' square, I should export at: 200/5*50 = 2000 x 2000 pixels. 50 pixels per 5' square is a good level to use, some people use more (64 or even 100), you probably won't want to use much less than this unless the map is huge.

Do not use this PNG as your final battlemap (it will be too large). Load it up in your favourite graphics application (I use GIMP) and export as a JPG with quality somewhere between 50-80 - make sure the final file size is below 1MB, much smaller if possible.

Why do I export as PNG and then change to JPG? Basically, the PNG export is a very high quality and it will show the CC3 effects well - but it can take a while to export from CC3. But further editing/changes in quality can be done quickly in GIMP! (or similar) to give you your final FG ready JPG file. If you were doing all of the quality change experiments in CC3 you would be waiting for the CC3 engine to do all of the rendering each time and that could take a long time. Export from CC3 once at a good quality and then do further work in GIMP!

[Trenloe]

I believe they added a save option for Fantasy Grounds to CC3 that sets squares at 50 pixels per square.
I don't see this as an option or a setting within standard CC3 or CC3+. Do you know any more about this Doug? Perhaps it's a setting file that you need to load?

[Zacchaeus]

Wow, Trenloe you strike again. I was saving mine out as rectangular Jpg's (I multiplied the size by 100 and used an alias of anything up to 50) before doing the GIMP thing. But saving as PNG's gives a much higher quality, and I mean hugely better with almost no pixelation at all when zooming in. You're my BFF :)