[Award Winner] Basic CC3 Concepts explained

[Valarian]

Layers in 3DS Max are not really layers, either. They are more like alternate planes of existence. They have nothing to do with "what's on top of what." They are just collections of objects, and they can be hidden/shown wholly, or their objects can be hidden/shown singly. The sequence of layers in the Layers panel in meaningless -- you can't "put a layer on top of another".

Is a CC layer anything like that?

Just so ... yes. Except the bit about the show/hide singly when it comes to the objects. If you hide the layer, it's all or nothing.

[loydb]

I just think of it as:

sheets == layers ala' Photoshop
layers == symbol grouping for ease of mass manipulation of similar entities

[jaerdaph]

A CC3 Sheet is really like what you expect a layer to be. A CC3 Layer is more like a category. Whenever I see the word "layer" in CC3, I mentally replace it with "category".

[NeonKnight]

Well, programs like Photoshop and what not have been around only since around 1988 at the absolute earliest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshop), while the FastCAD program CC3 and it's predecessors are based off have been around since 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCAD ). Cam[aign Cartographer came out in 1993 and uses the FASTCAD engine.

So, I believe they were sort of locked into the use of LAYERS at the time of initial development.

[jaerdaph]

So, I believe they were sort of locked into the use of LAYERS at the time of initial development.

Yeah - sheets were a later addition to FastCAD, and Profantasy initially took advantage of them specifically for starship deck plans in Cosmographer, where each sheet would be a different deck, all within the same drawing. Now that sheets are used for effects in CC3, Cosmographer will most likely require you to do different decks in their own FCW drawing file. Not a bad tradeoff, though.