Perspectives question
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
Hey everyone 
I've had Perspectives 3 for some time, but never used it. I've been too busy.
I know there are lots of lovely tutorials for learning how to use it, but (typically for me) I've got a plan in mind of what I want to do with it and I don't think I've seen anything that really answers the questions I now have.
By reading the Tome I know that I could take a top down floor plan and convert it to a Perspectives building, but what about the roof? How do you create an angled roof on a complex/irregular floor plan? I remember seeing that it wasn't easy when Tonnichiwa created his cylindrical medieval theatre.
My buildings would be very much more simple, since I'm thinking of a perspectives city map built on a top view city plan.
I also remember there being a possible memory and speed issue with using Perspectives to make a map that contains enough buildings for a city instead of a plan of just one building. Is that a big problem?
I've had Perspectives 3 for some time, but never used it. I've been too busy.
I know there are lots of lovely tutorials for learning how to use it, but (typically for me) I've got a plan in mind of what I want to do with it and I don't think I've seen anything that really answers the questions I now have.
By reading the Tome I know that I could take a top down floor plan and convert it to a Perspectives building, but what about the roof? How do you create an angled roof on a complex/irregular floor plan? I remember seeing that it wasn't easy when Tonnichiwa created his cylindrical medieval theatre.
My buildings would be very much more simple, since I'm thinking of a perspectives city map built on a top view city plan.
I also remember there being a possible memory and speed issue with using Perspectives to make a map that contains enough buildings for a city instead of a plan of just one building. Is that a big problem?
Comments
If the answer to the memory load question is 'yes, there's a memory problem' then it might be a REALLY short thread! :P
I don't have the PC capacity to deal with anything PF would consider to be a big file
If your roof is sqare or rectangular, even if that is in sections, then it should be easy enough to create a roof for it. If the building has any circular or triangular shapes though, this can be a real problem. It isn't that it can't be done, but it takes quite a bit more time to mess around with the settings and the different commands to try to create those more than basic shapes for a roof. The reason is because the perspectives 3 program uses rectangles and squares as the default shapes for houses and automatically attaches the roof. So you sort of have to draw the vertical walls very short so they don't really show up, then the roof gets automatically added during the last step of the process. But since you didn't draw the walls very long, it will end up looking like it is only a roof.
I know that wasn't a great explanation so I'm sorry if I've just confused you. There are a few commands that can be used to do a few different shapes as well that can be added as a roof, but these are listed in the manual as still being in the beta stage. You can make the shapes of a pyramid, a cone, a sphere, a spherical section, and a slope. If you practice with those shapes though, you should be able to make them work well.
Yes, there are memory issues once you have multiple buildings on a map in Perspectives 3. That's why I just made one building at a time, then made them into symbols, and placed them on my maps as symbols, rather than trying to create a whole map in one go. If you decide to try making all of the buildings in one go instead of making them into symbols and importing them to your map, then you will see the rendering time after a while will start to take FOREVER! To give you an idea, once I had made ten buildings, and laid down some trees and mountains and the base background of grass, it took about four hours to render.
Making that same map by making the buildings into symbols first and importing just took about ten minutes to render when done.
Hi Lorelei, (waves)
Thank you for explaining the detail.
If its only the rendering time, and not the time it takes to pan, zoom and generally do things while mapping, then its not really a problem from my point of view, which is good, since I would be doing this for the Atlas and wouldn't necessarily be free to create a whole load of new symbols.
The irregular roof shape thing is really worrying me now. I'm going to have to practice a few things before I really commit myself to a whole city.
I want to make Sanctuary as a Perspectives city, but my machine has RAM and Win 10 incompatibility issues so I can't do big files until I get more RAM or a new machine. That's only in the pipeline right now, so to do a city as big as Sanctuary it would be better for me to draw a whole load of new symbols and do it that way. However, if I do that, then I can't really include it in the Atlas - which was the main point of doing it in the first place.
This is all quite apart from any irregular roof shape issues there might be.
I could make a new symbol set and ask Remy if he would house it in the Atlas, but that would take a huge amount of time to generate the two views of each of very many unique buildings, and I was rather hoping to get started on Sanctuary fairly quickly now that I've got a couple of weeks free to do things in.
I have to admit that its a very attractive idea - but again a distraction from the main purpose of getting Sanctuary going again.
I might be better doing Sanctuary as a normal top down city and then thinking about a new iso city symbol set - along with all the other symbol projects I've got going.
I need to think some more....
I've already started on Sanctuary as a conventional CD3 map so that it is more accessible to everyone. I'm trying my hardest not to add too many extra sheets in there
Sorry, Lorelei!
It was a nice idea, but I think the iso version is just too much for me and my little machine right now.
CD3 it is then
If you use either the new city generator or one of the online generators it can give you a head start, or at least a few ideas.
I wanted to make a slope under the stairs, and found I couldn't. I asked about it in here, and it wasn't possible.
But maybe there is a way, I just couldn't figure it out.
I think I'm actually thinking along the wrong lines with Perspectives - trying to make it fit an ideal I have instead of using it properly as it is intended to be used.
LOL! Never mind. I will get on with mapping Sanctuary, and then maybe come back to this idea and follow Remy's suggestion that I start a whole lot smaller.
1. Draw the 2D shape of the walls (black) and add the lines defining the roof (orange): the slighly overlapping edges and the top edges.
2. Use the Isometric Projection tool from P3 to create the floor shape, including the orange lines.
3. Move the orange lines to their desired height (for example, inner and outer octogons 20' high, mid octogon 30' high).
4. With the Extrude command, draw the walls (alternatively do it after finishing the roofs and put the walls under the roofs, or use different sheets etc.)
5. Hide the walls. Perform the List command on any orange line and note the bearing (here 54.34301°). Now use the text only command SHADEP. Set the angle to the noted bearing and set the pitch to something in the 30°-60° range (it will only affect the contrast of the slopes). Check Shear Fill Side and Left and leave the rest unchecked. Click OK and use the Endpoint modifier to connect all the vertices of the desired slope.
6. Repeat for all the slopes. Note that you need to add/subtract 180° to the bearing for the inner slopes to get the shading consistent.
Hope it helps,
JdR
That helps enormously.
Thank you very very much, Jaochim
I can see all kinds of possibilities now...
You could do any shape you wished, as long as you drew the roof outline before you used the Isometric Projection tool.
I wonder if there's a way to write one of those bits of code to do the roof automatically (I'm sorry - I've only just woken after a very short night and the name of them escapes me)?
Do you think a beginner would be able to do one that meant she would only have to click a button she made, select the isometrically projected shape, decide how many floors the building has, the height of the roof (for the pitch), and then click OK. I've really no idea what a macro can and can't achieve, but that would be incredibly handy when looking at the possibility of doing a city with well over 3 thousand buildings in it.
(oh yes - look at that - I can remember its called a macro if I don't think about it. Stupid brain!)
Another app that's even more useful for something like that is Sketchup, but unless you pay about £700 for the pro version you can't use the rendered product for anything other than personal use.
I tried using Roachim's method earlier today, and confused myself to death by biting off more than I could chew, so I'm still thinking about how this might be done without a very extensive new symbol set. I think that is why there have been quite a few isometric cities built with overland settlement symbols just lately.
For now I've returned to working on the CD3 version.
That is not to say that I've abandoned the idea
EDIT: I've managed to fix the isometric angle issue - by reducing the height of my imported image until it is about right (not perfect, but close), but I have a new issue. Is is possible to export very large map images once edited? my desired image size is just shy of 9216 pixels by 6050 pixels, but the output .JPG files are 1/10th of the size I need, so all detail is lost.
Most modern game graphics use a form of parallel projection, which isn't true isometric projection at all and may vary quite a lot from publisher to publisher. Per3, on the other hand, is totally isometric and cannot be altered. This may cause issues when importing ideas that originate in apps that use different forms of parallel projection. It is better explained here on this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_video_game_graphics
When you export your work from Per3 and you have just opened the Save as... dialog, pick one of the bitmap options and click the Options button at the bottom right. This will open a second dialog which give you control over the size and quality of your exported image.