How to make Hex Symbols
Highland_Piper
Surveyor
Good day,
I'm still working on my modular hex dungeons and a thought just occurred to me that I might be able to make full scale maps by making the tiles into symbols like with Mike Schley's Overland Hex January 2018 Annual style. However I have no idea the best way to go about it. I have well over a hundred hex dungeon tiles, it is a bit of an obsession really. Making them into symbols that could be properly rotated like with the Overland Hex symbols would greatly reduce my time making random dungeons.
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
I'm still working on my modular hex dungeons and a thought just occurred to me that I might be able to make full scale maps by making the tiles into symbols like with Mike Schley's Overland Hex January 2018 Annual style. However I have no idea the best way to go about it. I have well over a hundred hex dungeon tiles, it is a bit of an obsession really. Making them into symbols that could be properly rotated like with the Overland Hex symbols would greatly reduce my time making random dungeons.
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Comments
*edited as I figured some of it out*
Do to the sheet effects I have a mask around the tile. But I can not seem to create a symbol of just the area I need. It doesn't work without the mask, and with the mask it is no longer a proper hexagon.
Importing the png of the tiles gives a white background despite them being saved with a transparency, making them rectangular.
Ideally I'd like to have all the wall features and everything available and not just a png. Like CA61 does for the flat tiles. All the walls, floors, symbols are there to be edited if need be.
What do you mean when you say the snapping for the hex grid isn't spot on?
Importing the tiles as symbols with editable features is also possible, but it is a bit more work. You have to take advantage of multi-sheet symbols. To do this, you need to enable the symbol options convert line style names to sheets. And then you need to assign line styles of appropriate names to all the entities. For example, to make the walls end up on the WALLS sheet, make a new line style named WALLS, and set the walls to use that style. Then you can just create them as symbols within CC3+ without rendering them as .png's.
Do note that symbols shouldn't be nested, so you should explode all symbols on the tiles before doing this.
If I were you, I would start by some really simple test cases though,
questions
1) is there an easy way to have it rotate by 60° by just using the arrow keys?
2) How do you add walls to a open ended Corridor tool? It just makes one wall in the centre
2. Drawing tools are not smart enough to do things like this. They either do the outline (which is the walls in this case) all the way around (or in the case of a path instead of a polygon, a single outline centered on the outline), or not at all. To get this behavior, you need to use the DD3 corridor tool, it is made for that purpose. For a path tool, you can somewhat imitate this by making the walls the main entity, and the floor the outline. Then set the main entity to be wider than the floor. Of course, this way of doing it means the floors sheet mus be drawn on top of the walls sheet, and this approach would also cause issues for the wall shadows.
Doing a geomorphic dungeon in hex has a certain challenge. That is to have a corridor match flush while rotating at 160° So in the attached picture the I have my build template. It is not part of the symbols just allows me to accurately draw them. You have a hex within a hex. The smaller hexes are 3' and the large one consists of 7 hexes so is 21'. This is for printing out battle tiles which are 7 inches flat to flat on the hex. It is the largest that can be made for both US Letter and A4 paper. I also have a 4" version that I've only partly worked on.
I'm going to attempt to explain myself but I've not been doing a very good job of it lately. My thought was to make symbols of just the floors of the geomorphs. Mostly for practice but then I want to add walls later and continue to make more complex symbols. The problem I'm having is the horizontal corridors. So the 6' corridors (colour 29 in the picture) meet flush with the edges of the hex. The horizontal corridors can not be 6' and still maintain corner to corner compatibility. They are 5.21 line width. So because they have an angled edge the sna doesn't go from the middle of the end but the part that stick out the farthest. I've tried None, Box, and Circle.
Is there a way to make it "snap" from where the middle of the hex is? I think that would solve it but I can't figure out how to do it. At least then if it is a top horizontal corridor and the snap is offest to be in the middle of the hex it should theoretically place it properly.
I want to shy away from just making a hex shaped symbols as I want to integrate the geomorphs with free style mapping.
If your interested in my thoughts behind why I do it like this here are some blog posts dedicated to the hex geomorphs.
https://gurps.dungeoncrawlers.com/tag/geomorphs/
Single = 3' with horizontal being roughly 2.61
Double = 6' with horizontal being 5.21
Triple = 9' With horizontal being roughly 7.8
But if you make the symbols with a background (hex-shaped obviously), you should be able to go into the symbol manager, use change properties on that background element, and send it to a specific layer. Then, if this layer is set as hidden in the map you use the hexes in, it will become invisible.
Thank you. I've been going about this the wrong way and it was like getting the door slammed in my face each time.
(Don't feel bad at not noticing that. I have autism, and patterns like that click in my brain the instant I see them - even if they are different colours)
I would name them much as you have in the image above, and add any extra details after that main name. If you don't like long names then use obvious abbreviations for words like single, double and triple, or even just S, D and T. That should cut the length of each name down quite a lot. H and V are quite often used for horizontal and vertical as well.
Symbols you mean to use as a collection (for example rotated versions of the same thing, or collections of similar hexagon patterns) need to all have the same name with different numbers at the end. If there are more than 9 in each collection you will need to number them 01, 02, 03, etc, so that there are the same number of digits at the end of each file name.
I saw that over on the FB page, but I couldn't really see the detail there.
Okay for some reason I can't add the image. I get this message
Some problems were encountered
The file you attempted to upload (Encounter 1-1.PNG) was empty.
You are not allowed to upload (Encounter 1-1.PNG) the requested file type:
Are you intending to make the hex symbols like this, or keep them as polygon shapes?
So here is what I have for 6' tiles already. I'm sure I can come up with 50+ more if I really set my mind to it but these by themselves will make some very complex and organic looking dungeons using hexagon geomorphs. Currently the shapes are simple with no walls to accommodate the 'Ruins of the Undermountain' style. However once I am finally satisfied that I've covered the majority of shapes I will start adding a layer of walls to them. Eventually I will then make four sets of symbols for them 3', 6', 9', & connector symbols between the three connection widths.
The brilliant thing about CC3+ is I can take these floor symbols put them together and either multipoly them or just put them on a temp layer and retrace them and you can have whatever fill style you want.
There does not seem to be an end to the number of geomorphs I can make with a hex