3D view
The 3D button in the top bar switches the canvas to a three-dimensional view of the same map — a real height-mapped surface you can orbit. It’s a working view, not a preview window: the Build panel stays open beside it, and every terrain slider rebuilds the landscape as you drag.
Press it again (or hit Esc) to go back to the flat map.
Working in 3D
Section titled “Working in 3D”- Orbit by dragging, zoom with the wheel.
- Tune terrain live. Water level, ruggedness, mountains, rivers, forests — anything on the Build tool reruns and the model rebuilds, so you can shape a coastline or a mountain range while looking at it from the side.
Towns and roads
Section titled “Towns and roads”Settlements and roads are drawn on the terrain, in the same styles as the flat map — including any per-town icons you’ve picked. Hover a town or a road and its name appears.
That’s the point of the view: it’s a preview of how the map reads as an interactive scene, so you can check that a capital sits where the land justifies it and that a highway follows a valley rather than climbing a ridge.
Turn them off with the Towns & roads checkbox if you want to look at bare landform.
Roads are painted onto the land itself, and towns stand on it — so both are hidden when the terrain gets in the way. Orbit around a mountain range and the settlements behind it disappear, exactly as they should.
Framing the model
Section titled “Framing the model”The panel on the right sets how the model itself is built:
| Slider | What it does |
|---|---|
| Land amplitude | Overall land height — how tall the tallest peaks reach. |
| Relief contrast | How much mountains stand out from the plains. 1 is even; higher gives dramatic peaks over flat lowlands. |
| Ocean depth | How far the sea floor sinks below the water plane. 0 keeps the ocean flat at the shoreline. |
| Canopy height | How far the forest lifts off the surface. |
These are saved with the map. Come back to it from My Maps, share it as a map code, or save it as a preset, and it opens framed the way you left it.
Why use it
Section titled “Why use it”- Sanity-check mountain placement. Tall ranges sometimes read OK from above but feel wrong in three dimensions. Tumbling the map catches issues like a peak in the middle of a coast or a valley that doesn’t make sense.
- Pick a hero angle. If you screenshot the 3D view for a session handout, an oblique low-angle shot reads very differently from a top-down ortho.
- Read elevation. Even with Mountain obliqueness pushed up on the 2D preview, the 3D view shows the actual terrain rather than the cartographic effect.
What needs the flat map
Section titled “What needs the flat map”- Painting and decorating. Brush strokes and the feature editor (moving towns, editing roads, placing decorations) draw onto the flat canvas, so those panels show a Back to 2D button while you’re in 3D.
- Labels and the vector overlay — town names, kingdom borders, road strokes. The 3D view shows terrain; the flat map is where the cartography lives.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Terrain & detail — the Mountain obliqueness slider in the Aesthetics card is the 2D equivalent of tilting in 3D.