Precise placement of city streets (smooth paths)?
Ciel
Traveler
So I never really thought about this before, because the only city map I've made a lot of progress on is of a smaller, fairly old city, that doesn't have much of a "street grid" - the streets are fairly loose in their organization. But now I've just begun the process of trying to map out a much bigger city. And I've come across an interesting question. For reference, these are all modern cities, mapped in CC3+ using the "Modern City" 2007 annual style.
So my question is this: is there a way, when drawing using the "street" tools in this style (which are smooth path drawtools), to control exactly how the streets are placed? Meaning, let's say you want to make it so several streets all in a row are all perfectly parallel with each other. If these streets run exactly north-south or east-west, then one can use the "vanishing" effect of the cross-hair in CC3 to make sure it's perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, but what if the streets run diagonally? I place the first street, running, say... northeast to southwest. Then I want the second street to also be northeast to southwest, but it needs to be EXACTLY parallel to the first street.
Let's also say I'm gonna add a third, fourth, and fifth street, all going in the same direction. Now, not only do I want them to be parallel to each other, but I also want them to be spaced the same distance apart from one another, so that the distance between street 1 and street 2, is exactly the same as the distance between street 2 and street 3, and so on.
I looked around a bit, but didn't really see a way to do this. Eyeballing it would be fine in some cases, but I do wonder if there is some function in CC3/CC3+ that I just don't know about to enable this kind of precision while drawing?
So my question is this: is there a way, when drawing using the "street" tools in this style (which are smooth path drawtools), to control exactly how the streets are placed? Meaning, let's say you want to make it so several streets all in a row are all perfectly parallel with each other. If these streets run exactly north-south or east-west, then one can use the "vanishing" effect of the cross-hair in CC3 to make sure it's perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, but what if the streets run diagonally? I place the first street, running, say... northeast to southwest. Then I want the second street to also be northeast to southwest, but it needs to be EXACTLY parallel to the first street.
Let's also say I'm gonna add a third, fourth, and fifth street, all going in the same direction. Now, not only do I want them to be parallel to each other, but I also want them to be spaced the same distance apart from one another, so that the distance between street 1 and street 2, is exactly the same as the distance between street 2 and street 3, and so on.
I looked around a bit, but didn't really see a way to do this. Eyeballing it would be fine in some cases, but I do wonder if there is some function in CC3/CC3+ that I just don't know about to enable this kind of precision while drawing?
Comments
I hope that helps,
~Dogtag
So thanks! This looks like just what I needed to be able to line up city streets precisely. Thanks much Dogtag!
One other question: I noticed when I pick "Offset" from the main menu, it says: "Right-click the Offset icon for the same options."
That almost makes it sound like there should be a standard CC3+ icon somewhere on the toolbars that I Can click or right-click, but I didn't see one anywhere. Is there one, or a way to add one? Or is going into the actual "Draw" menu and selecting it the only way to activate the command? Having a shortcut/icon would be quite handy.
JimP: I appreciate the effort, but that's not quite something that'd work for what I'm doing, for multiple reasons, haha. But the offset tool seems to provide exactly what I need, so all is well.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
And hey, I think we're all nerds here aren't we?? XD Ah, drats. Hang on... you can do that? Make toolbar buttons? I didn't know this! No problem, and thanks for all the help! And yeah, after I posted I went back to the article by Monsen explaining the command and saw that text command. So that could be a convenient way to activate it, as well.