Custom style and other things
Okay, this is gonna be a big thing I'm afraid so bear with me.
My goal is to make mock up technical drawings for my settings' spaceships. For this purpose I'd like to be able to do several things, and have them all in a custom deckplan map style. I'd want drawing tools that allow me to make a room, that then fills it with texture and surrounds it with bulkheads at a predetermined width. Same thing for corridors. I've been trying to make both rectangle and polygon version of both the room and corridor tools, but my problem is that if I set the outline for .30 units, then two rooms next to each other sharing a bulkhead will end up having a thickness of .60 units.
I'd also like to have my drawing tools available to me in the left hand side panel so I can quickly go from a room to a corridor and back to a room.
Furthermore, I'd love to be able to create my own symbol set to go along with this mock technical drawing style: Abstractions of different alaments such as weapon emplacements, duty stations or bunks that scale to map.
Couple extra questions:
- After you've set the size and background in cosmographer, how do you change the size and the background after the fact?
- using the rectangle drawing tool behaves strangely. First of all I understood it should prompt me for a single point after the initial, but it wants two. Also, after placing the initial point there are cases when writing down inverse relational coordinates - say @0,3 and @0-3, to place the next point three units up or down from the current one, respectively - both have resulted in the point being placed 3 units down from the last placed unit, instead of expected behavior.
- if I want to make more decks after making the initial one and giving no value to decks/floors prompt when creating it, how do I make it happen? How do I keep everything lined up? And furthermore, what is the workflow if I want to make multi view technical drawings? Like, one view from above, second from the side, third from the front, fourth from the back?
I'm running a CC3+ with a cosmographer add on.
My questions might not be super well formatted, but I ask for patience. I really want to learn this program.
Comments
Hi Narmondur :)
If you are still learning CC3+ it might be a good idea to get to know what Cosmographer can do first (and possibly a whole lot less frustrating), before launching straight off into stuff like making whole new styles for it. It is relatively easy to make your own new style - as long as you understand how things work before you start.
For that reason I recommend reading the Introduction and Creating a Deckplan from the Cos3 User Manual, and then maybe making a small test map or two to play around with a few of the tools available to you. This will give you a much better idea of what is possible in a new style.
Ralf did at least one live mapping session on deckplans. These two might be helpful to grasp the theory in a more practical sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYd4mL9Hdbc
https://youtu.be/jh_bxIuXBE4?t=719
I find these old videos (from 12 years ago) a hidden gem to learn how to make our own symbols and catalogs:
The original playllist is this one (Symbols, Control points & Varicolor):
.. but the following 5 videos were never added to that playlist, so I added them to another playlist (plus a few other videos I also value very highly):