Caves, Fractal walls, and Sheets....Oh my!!
DmDomination
Newcomer
I find myself having to post on the forums a few times this year and I hope i'm doing it in the right place but here we go again.
I am attempting to draw a custom map for a random encounter in my Out of the Abyss campaign, it is intended to be a series of caves with spider webs and so forth choking the passages. I'm pretty sure I have mastered the standard dungeon mapping through reading the manual, video tutorials, and the help of you kind folks but these cave maps are messing me up.
If i use the cave feature and draw a cave and then attempt to play a web symbol it goes on the symbol sheet and it is on top of the wall.....i attempted to move it to a lower and lower sheet (higher towards the top of the list on the sheets window) and even at the very very lowest one, "Common Sheet" it is still on top of the wall so i tried to go the other way and put it on the every single sheet (redrawing after each) and it is stubbornly on top of the wall. I concluded that this was a idiosyncrasy of the cave feature so I decided to just draw my caverns using the "wall" tool but i still wanted it to look....ya know....cave-y. I tried to use the fractal path and other such options but I was unable to find one that would draw a cave like wall in the same manner as if i were using the "cave" drawing tool so now i'm at a loss. I have to either figure out to get symbols below the wall of the cave using the cave feature to draw it or figure out a way to draw a cave looking wall with the wall feature so the symbols will go below the wall by default the way they do when i do a standard dungeon. I really hope that made sense and i really appreciate all the help i've gotten from people on the forums here.
Perhaps in the near future i'll be able to learn enough to help other people who later post their question. Thanks again all.
I am attempting to draw a custom map for a random encounter in my Out of the Abyss campaign, it is intended to be a series of caves with spider webs and so forth choking the passages. I'm pretty sure I have mastered the standard dungeon mapping through reading the manual, video tutorials, and the help of you kind folks but these cave maps are messing me up.
If i use the cave feature and draw a cave and then attempt to play a web symbol it goes on the symbol sheet and it is on top of the wall.....i attempted to move it to a lower and lower sheet (higher towards the top of the list on the sheets window) and even at the very very lowest one, "Common Sheet" it is still on top of the wall so i tried to go the other way and put it on the every single sheet (redrawing after each) and it is stubbornly on top of the wall. I concluded that this was a idiosyncrasy of the cave feature so I decided to just draw my caverns using the "wall" tool but i still wanted it to look....ya know....cave-y. I tried to use the fractal path and other such options but I was unable to find one that would draw a cave like wall in the same manner as if i were using the "cave" drawing tool so now i'm at a loss. I have to either figure out to get symbols below the wall of the cave using the cave feature to draw it or figure out a way to draw a cave looking wall with the wall feature so the symbols will go below the wall by default the way they do when i do a standard dungeon. I really hope that made sense and i really appreciate all the help i've gotten from people on the forums here.
Perhaps in the near future i'll be able to learn enough to help other people who later post their question. Thanks again all.
Comments
Second, bear in mind that drawing tools are really just convenient collections of CC3 commands that you could also do separately, if you wanted to. The tools just make things a LOT easier by combining a lot of commands and settings at once, like setting the layers, sheets, fills, colors and so on and then drawing floors and walls at the same time and stuff. That said, there are several different ways to draw caves and different map styles might use different drawing tools.
Can you post a copy of the map that's giving you trouble? It might be easier to help you figure this out if we could see exactly what's happening in the map (though it's also possible someone besides you and me might just know the issue off the top of their head).
Cheers,
~Dogtag
If I'm guessing right, you can add a wall mask after you finish laying out the cave floor. It's wise to add the mask last. I did a video tutorial on wall masks, if it'll help. Sorry for the brevity. I'm using my phone, which is no way to post on a forum.
In some cases you will always have shadows over the walls. In those cases you can create a floor mask.
You can easily see what the drawing tool is drawing, and which sheets and layers it's using, to get a better idea of what you're putting on your map. See the "Drawing Tools" section of the CC3+ User's Manual, starting on p. 86. You can open it from within CC3+ by selecting Help>User Manual from the menu bar.
It's also a great place to get general map making advice, not about the cc3+ program (there aren't that many of us over there), but just general knowledge that always proves usefull. Plus there are discussions and challenges that anyone can join in on, and you can create an album gallery of your maps, which you could then make available to the public if you wished.
Cheers,
~Dogtag