Profantasy Comographer

[Shadow Bear]

For those designers that use Profantasy products for SF type designs should check out the newest product from PF. Right now only the download is available but they will send a boxed edition when it become available. Lots and Lots of great SF symbols include ship design, starmaps and world maps.

 

[signless]

I'm a CC2 Pro user, and I can vouch for the quality of their products...Cosmographer has been a loooong time coming for us sci-fi gaming types.
A word of caution, though...CC2 Pro stuff has a rather steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with an autocad-type of program. It can be frustrating as hell at first...but if you stick with it, you'll realize it's a top-notch product with a lot of power to it.
The CC2 Pro program used to cost more than $70USD...but they've slashed the price and made it LOTS more affordable.
I've used AutoRealm and Dungeon Designer in the past...but the more I use CC2, the happier I am I made the investment. Again, it's NOT for everyone, and if you DO decide to go with it...be prepared to spend some serious time learning the system.

 

[Tanuki]

The best thing you can do when you get CC2 is to go through the included tutorial. Go all the way through it and don't skip anything.

When you've done that you'll have a solid foundation and learning to use CC2 better will be much easier.

I've seen Cosmographer and it blows everything else out of the water. I just finished placing my order for it.

 

[vutpakdi]

Originally posted by Tanuki:

I've seen Cosmographer and it blows everything else out of the water. I just finished placing my order for it.

I don't know if I'd say that, but, then again, I happen to love and extensively use Canvas for deckplans and professional work.

That said, I did get a quick demo of Cosmographer here at GenCon. Good set of symbols and some good templates. If you go to the trouble of learning how to use CC2, it should be easy to come out with some professional looking deckplans, planetary maps, and subsector/sector maps. If I ever decide to do my own subsector/sector maps, I may very well pick it up myself given that while it's easy to do a grid overlay/background in Canvas, I don't yet see an easy way to do a hex overlay.

One oddity though: I still don't see Cosmographer mentioned on the ProFantasy website anywhere. Weird.

One other pretty cool looking program is NBOS Software's AstroSynthesis. Not particularly useful looking for Traveller, but very cool for Traveller 2300/2320: 3D starmaps.

Ron

 

[savage]

sounds good... any examples yet.


Scott

 

[peteyfroggboy]

Originally posted by Tanuki:
...while it's easy to do a grid overlay/background in Canvas, I don't yet see an easy way to do a hex overlay.

I ended up copy-pasting together a big JPEG of hexes in Photoshop, then placing it into Illustrator in Multiply mode as an overlay. Not the best solution, but it works in a pinch and I can reuse it wherever I need it.

My big mind-bender is how to make a hex-grid whiteboard for use with miniatures...

 

[notagoodusername]

Originally posted by Ron Vutpakdi:
One oddity though: I still don't see Cosmographer mentioned on the ProFantasy website anywhere. Weird.

It is in the online shop only at the moment, Ron.

It looks good so far, but I can't find a way of automating sector map processes without some scripting, which makes it more work than not using it unfortunately...

That said, if you aren't doing huge bulk amounts of maps it will work well, plus when some scripyts appear.

Shane

 

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by Ron Vutpakdi:
One oddity though: I still don't see Cosmographer mentioned on the ProFantasy website anywhere. Weird.

It's there now.

http://www.profantasy.com/products/cos.asp

I have been playing with my copy and it's very nice!

 

[GJD]

Their examples page:

http://www.profantasy.com/products/cos_examples.asp

G.

 

[etherflyer]

Interesting.

I checked the price on the download version, and apparently it will be $39.95 US, converted to GB pounds at eth curernt exchange rate. Which is odd, considering that I'm in Canada, and thus my credit card is charged in Cdn dollars.

(Yes, I did select Canada as the region.)