CC3 Map Making

[randyd9090]

CC3 Maps just will not line up correctly, some parts do some don't. I have used gimp to try and resize the map and I am getting very frustrated.

[Zacchaeus]

Here's a guide.

Step 1. Draw your map in CC3 and make it a height and width in feet using multiples of 5. So 120x80, 1000x200 or whatever
Step 2. Use a 5' Grid whilst you draw your map so that everything will line up properly. Draw somewhere on the map a black or white (or any other colour) 5' square - this will be used to line up the FG grid in due course.
Step 3. Hide the grid in the sheet dialog.
Step 4a. Select Save As in the CC3 menu and when you get to the dialog select BMP as the save type down at the bottom.
Step 4b. Click on 'options' in the same dialog. Enter a width and height into the image dimensions. The entries here should be either 50 or 100 times the width and height or your map. So if it was originally 120x 80 then make it 1200x800 or 600x400. The higher the numbers here the higher the quality map you will export. You can go higher and multiply by 150 or 200 but you'll end up with a huge map and could crash CC3.
Step 5. Tick the Antialias box and leave the number at 25%. Also tick the Crop image to aspect ratio and restrict image to map border.
Step 6. Click ok, then click save.
Step 7. Open up your newly exported map in GIMP and click 'Export As', select jpg, change the tag on the map to .jpg and then click ok. Select 75% from the pop up.
Step 8. Open up FG and place the image in the image folder. Draw a grid using the cloured box that you painted onto the map at step 2.
Step 9. Breath a sigh of relief and end frustration.

[Trenloe]

To expand on step 4. Using 100 times the dimensions of the map in feet will give you 50 pixels per 5 foot square. Knowing the exact number of pixels per square will allow you to be much more accurate in your grid matching. If you don't place your grid in FG with the exact size of the square matching (the green number shown when creating the grid in FG) then your grid will match in one part of the map and will slowly drift away from that point and not match elsewhere. Just a mismatch of one pixel will result in a 20% mismatch 10 squares away.

You can also reduce the annoying mismatch by not putting a grid on your end map. Put a single square somewhere unobtrusive that you can use to get the size and base alignment correct, then it won't matter if there is a slight mismatch on areas of the map because you won't have another grid to be misaligned to. See the map in this post as an example: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?26993-Advice-on-setting-up-CC3-for-scaling-tp-FG&p=240887#post240887

[Zacchaeus]

Oops, I just noticed there are two step 4's - so I changed them to 4a and 4b. So Trenloe's first comment above relates to 4b. Also, although it might not have been very clear the combination of step 2, step 3 and step 8 is what Trenloe is pointing out in his second paragraph above. I use the grid to make the drawing so that I can line stuff up properly. There is a grid of little dots somewhere in there but it's mostly invisible to me so I like to draw in the grid. However, as Trenloe says, it is vital to hide the grid before exporting from CC3. One of the complete nightmares in converting published modules for FG is trying to align the grid with what's drawn on the map. So no grid maps are the way to go. If you haven't already by the way I would recommend upgrading to CC3+; it exports stuff a whole lot better and with a whole lot less crashes than CC3 does.

Finally if you get really stuck with trying to get a grid aligned on a map have a look at this tool (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?19813-Map-Align-Utility-to-scale-and-align-map-to-grid). I use it extensively to get grids aligned to published maps with (almost) 100% success rate.