Problem with layers
Trying to make a nice smooth river area but for some reason it won't meld with the snow, it just goes under it when I hit redraw. Any tips? Screenshots for reference:
Trying to make a nice smooth river area but for some reason it won't meld with the snow, it just goes under it when I hit redraw. Any tips? Screenshots for reference:
Comments
The first thing to do is to make sure that your RIVERS LAKES sheet is lower on the list of sheets than the TERRAIN SNOW sheet, so that rivers and lakes are drawn on top of the terrain. That's the default but I often accidentally click the Move Up or Move Down buttons, reordering things that I don't intend to.
And then also check to make sure that your river is actually going onto the RIVERS LAKES sheet, and your snow is on the TERRAIN SNOW sheet.
Unless I am misunderstanding you? When you say "river area," are you talking about the river itself, or more like the river bank?
If it's the river bank, you'll want to make sure that whatever terrain you're drawing appears farther down the list of sheets than the TERRAIN SNOW sheet. If you don't want to reorder your sheets, you could create a generic TERRAIN MISC sheet after TERRAIN SNOW for it.
So you see how the river is just on top of the snow? I want it to be that it's not just on top of the snow, but that there's a blend of landtype terrain surrounding the river where it's drawn, but whenever I do it and hit redraw it just goes away. I tried putting it under RIVERS LAKES but it wouldn't blend when I hit redraw.
Hmm. The "goes away" part makes me think that it's going on a sheet that is rendering before the snow, causing the snow to draw over it. Try using the Info-List tool to see if you can grab it, and then a dialog window will open that will tell you which sheet and layers it's on. I suspect it ended up on the LAND sheet or one of the other terrain sheets.
One approach would be to create a new sheet that is after TERRAIN SNOW but before RIVERS LAKES, like TERRAIN MISC or something. Copy the EDGE FADE, INNER sheet effect from one of the other Terrain sheets onto your new Terrain sheet so that it has the blending effect, and then move your polygon onto that new terrain sheet. You might have to reduce the edge width of the edge fade if it's larger than your polygon. You can do that by clicking on the sheet effect, clicking on the edit button, and then reducing the number of units for the first parameter, Edge Width.
I hope I'm following what you're trying to do. Apologies if I'm off base!
If you can't find where your terrain is going, post the FCW file here and I can take a peek.
The difficult thing here is when we refer to under and over.
Physically on the map you want it to be OVER. But on the sheets it needs to be UNDER.
When you look at all the sheets, the very first sheet is the lowest group of entities on the drawing (see Royal Scribes pictures) . Next sheet are above that on the drawing.
So they just keep stacking on top of each other. So when something gets covered up that you don't want covered up, you move that SHEET, down the column of SHEETS.
Also if you put it on the wrong sheet, you can change the properties with the Change Properties button.
Ideally hide the sheets a few at a time so you can see on which sheet the river is. (you can use the extract properties, but being a new user I don't want to overwhelm you with stuff)
Also LAYERS and SHEETS are two distinct ways to organize the drawing. Sheets group like entitites and add effects to them.
Layers are to organize and toggle on and off certain things in a drawing.
I hope some of this helps, if those are the questions you are asking.
How large is your map? I just fiddled around with Spectrum Overland on a small 50x50 map, and the Edge Fade, Inner effects on the FARMLAND sheet was too much for a tiny map. I had to reduce the edge width for it to work.
At the risk of confusing the issue even more by adding yet another different suggestion, do you mean like this, Matthew?
I drew the valley as part of the snowy terrain. Here it is again with the sheet effects turned off and the RIVERS LAKES sheet hidden so that you can see how I drew the polygon.
For some reason I can't seem to get the drawing tool to offer me an edit option (when
appears in the command line when you pick the same drawing tool again), so to edit the snow you may need to freeze the layer (layer, not sheet) that the land polygon is on (which is the RELIEF/CONTOURS layer), and use the node editing tools to move
, insert
or delete
nodes to reshape the snow polygon.
There are other ways of doing the same thing, like deleting the snow polygon and drawing it again, or using a Color Key sheet effect and cutting that valley out of the snow with a bright pink polygon, but moving a handful of nodes around is probably the quickest and easiest to understand the first time you do this without the benefit of the edit option.