03 - Atlas Ward [Mouse]

[Mouse]

Well... If you could see the map in all its glorious detail you would know that the teams playing there right now are the Ogres (literally) and the Mummies (also quite literally), and that the nets are actually giant fish traps (courtesy of Jo) which are acting as placeholders while I work out how to draw a proper goal net. I think the rules are that you have to capture and subdue the enemy... I mean opposition.... and put them in the cages, since we don't seem to have a ball of any kind! LOL!

[Mouse]

A few more houses. The hexagonal set are alms-houses for the poor, elderly and disabled (sheltered accommodation). All the new stuff is only draft, and needs more detail.

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[kacey]

I love all the little details you're putting into this, I hadn't thought about actually putting little people in my map, I see a few ponds too, and I like the boats, and I never even noticed the maze until today. I'm curious what is the original size of this?

[Mouse]

Thank you, Kacey

Umm... er.... aaah....

Ok answers in order of questions

Thank you...it was Redrobes that started it with his horses and carts....the ponds are symbols from Bogies Mapping Objects... I rendered the boats from Vue.... and the CC3 map has no size. You can zoom in till a single blade of grass fills the screen. Its how large I render the scene to a jpg image that's the important part. In this case the size of the rendered image is exactly 5962 x 3475 pi, and I reduce it by 70% to 4173 x 2433 pi

If I wanted to I could do the render in 4 quarters of the same proportions and stich the images together to make something 11924 x 6950, or into eighths to make a stitched up picture that is 23848 x 13900 pi... the limit really is how big I can go with the limitations of my laptop and Corel Photopaint 11, where I would stitch these images together. I think it would probably give up and die if I asked it to save an image as large as the biggest of these

Hope that answers all

[Redrobes]

Thats interesting about the zoom into blade of grass since thats what I do. Not having ever used CC3 tho do you need to put every token / icon down one by one or can you say make a map with 20 tokens in it of a house and then put that whole house in as one grouping ? I.e. if you moved one of your buildings does it imply that you have to drag around all those little bits of roof icons you made or can you grab the whole house or add another one of them and position that one ?

[Mouse]

Zooming in like that and having the capacity to make maps that are far larger than anything a raster-based piece of software could hope to handle is part and parcel of having a vector based program, but I'm sure you already knew that

The symbols (what we call icons) are individual, but you can group anything you like with the Group tool. The limitation of the tool, however, is that it places all the grouped objects (which can be any entity on the map, not just the symbols) on the same sheet - the active sheet, so if you have all your house bits on different sheets for different sheet effects (ie if the main roof casts a shadow 10 units long on the 'HOUSE1' sheet, while the dormers only glow black all the way around the edge a tiny bit on the 'DORMER' sheet) you can't really group them. That's why most of the official symbol sets consist of complete house symbols, in which the dormers etc have already been defined and shaded within each symbol as it was being created.

Moving symbols that are grouped is a 2 second job, but it doesn't take any longer really to move all the things on a single sheet, or a selected number of sheets, without any kind of grouping at all. You do this by hiding all the other sheets and selecting everything that's still visible with the select tool and moving it all in one go. That's the method I prefer - to hide everything but the sheets with things on them that need to be moved. Using this map as an example I would have to hide all but the BAY WINDOWS, HOUSES1, HOUSES2, HOUSES3, HOUSES4, DORMERS, and CHIMNEYS sheets to do it.

If you want to make a very large city very quickly you can use the random street tool, and there is even a random city tool, but I think that still only works in CC3 (the previous version of CC3+) I've never used either of them (even though you get CC3 with CC3+ when you buy the basic package) because I prefer to place things in a more exacting fashion. A city is a complex interactive structure, and in my mind its only right that it should take a corresponding amount of care and time to build

The fourth way of pasting groups of things into the map is by making a small cluster of objects somewhere on the map in a space of its own, and turning that cluster into a new symbol. You can do that within CC3+, and then add your new home made-composite symbol to a catalogue and use it just like any other symbol in the catalogue... Most useful for forests of trees...

There is a fifth way of making large groups of things like trees very quickly, and that is by creating a symbol fill - which does exactly what it says on the can. Having created this tool you can use it to draw a polygon of the area you want to be filled (a 5 second job in most cases), and it fills that area with trees. Again, however, I find it far more satisfying to place the trees individually - it really is extremely therapeutic dotting them around, knowing that while it took you 2 months to create the set, you can cover a map in them in half an hour


EDIT: Oh yes - I completely forgot to mention the clone tool, which is probably the closest thing to a direct answer. I can hide all but the aforementioned sheets, and use the clone tool to select groups of houses, or all of them, and copy the whole lot to paste to any number of other locations on the map.

You can also use the copy tool to move the same group of houses or city to an entirely new map base

[Redrobes]

Cool thanks. It seems remarkably similar to mine then. I dont have layers as such. Every icon is a layer in itself or it has no layers depending on how you look at it. I have another question tho. If you select a group of icons such as bits of house making up one whole building and clone / drag that over to a street with more buildings in it which are also made up of bits and crash them into each other so as to extend the street with a new building, then do the new icons fall on top of the street bits, below them, or a mix between the two. I always found this part of the process hard to work out what to do. In the end I made it so that it put the largest icons on the bottom and the small ones on top. Some apps have a Z order when you can raise or lower the Z of individual icons but its a chore sorting it all out.

Presumably then, you could also make the overall map if you made all the WIPs into transparent PNGs and scaled them and moved them into position and then (ok with a more powerful PC....) render it out as 16K square image ?

[Mouse]

The order of symbols on a sheet depends on the order of pasting, unless you select the ones you want to be generally all in front of all the rest on their respective sheets and use the 'bring to the front' tool. There is also a 'send to back tool' both these tools operate on the order of objects as they sit on their own sheet. They don't move things from sheet to sheet. There is a SYMSORT command, which when entered into the command line, uses an algorithm to sort out the ordering of (for example) mountain symbols that are all on the same sheet in an ISO map, but I've never used it on houses or in a top down view. It places the symbols that are closer to the bottom edge of the map on top of the symbols that are higher up the map, so that you don't have mountains in the Isometric distance that are on top of ones that are closer to the front. I have never used it on a top view map, though, and have no idea what it would do if I did.

To make the overall map I'd have to turn each of the sections into symbols to import them as transparent. I'm really not sure how the system would handle that, since symbols are usually much smaller than an entire district map. If it was possible to turn such huge images into symbols then I could probably create the overall map.... I just wouldn't be able to render it out all in one go.

CC3+ has a limit of 10,000 x 10,000 pixels in terms of the maximum render output (Full colour jpeg/png/bmp without antialiasing). Anything larger has to be created in a grid of sections and stitched together in a paint app (I use Corel Photopaint 11).

How large is the overall map, and what software are you using to make it?

[Mouse]

A lot of messing around with the cliff... adding details to the terrain... a new layout to the empty extent in the west of the region...

Doesn't look like much, but its taken me 2 days! LOL!

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[Falconius]

It looks like a hell of a lot to me. I see you've also deepend up the shadows. That cliff is looking really good now. (One of my favourite things to do with your uploads is take the last one and the new one and switch between them.)