I do save as often. Save as filename01_001, do some work on the map, save as filename01_002, etc. keep going until done.
Before uploading, i change it to filename01. Then save as png, less lossy then jpg, and use that to post here and my sites. Of course, since I save as 1200 x 1200 pixels, I use Irfanview to lower the size before uploading to here.
It appears that the Foothills 1 & 2 are on the LAND Sheet (which is under the LAND FEATURES SHEET). For some reason, the other hill symbols are on the SYMBOLS Sheet. All are on the Minerals/Mountains Layer. By some experimentation, it appears that these 2 symbols keep the Sheet that is on the Status Bar at the time. When I changed the Sheet to COASTLINE, for example, the symbol appeared in full, but doing a Info>List command showed thet although the layer was Minerals/Mountains, the Sheet was now COASTLINE. Funny that for the other Hill symbols the sheet automatically is SYMBOLS. I wonder why Mike Schley put the Foothills this way? I guess it can be changed individually by using the Change Properties button, but can it be changed in the Template by using the advanced options? My Map is below.
Thank you for talking about the autosave everyone. I still haven’t turned mine back on (just because I am being lazy right now) but you’ve convinced me. I’ll do that soon.
I am not sure yet if you can change those two fills in the advanced options in the template but my suspicion is that you can. I guess we’ll have to look that one up in the Tome of Ultimate Mapping and see.
And thanks for posting your work guys. LOL Hooky huh Barliman? Do I need to get out the ruler? :P
Just so everyone knows, this will be the last one of these I do until after Christmas. Feel free to do this at your leisure. Merry Christmas everyone.
Now let’s dive into what happened last time.
We put hills on the fill, clicked the redraw button and our hills were partly covered by the bitmap fill of the hill background. But, why?
Well, this is because of the sheet that the Bitmap fill is on and the Sheet that the hill is on.
When I asked you to put down the hills, did you happen to look to see what sheet they were on? If not, please go look and see what sheet they are on because this will be important.
As qwalker said, the hills themselves should be on the sheet titled “LAND” and the hills background should be on the sheet titled “LAND FEATURES”. So do you remember when I showed you how to open up the Drawing Sheets and Effects window? Please do so now.
I would like you to take a look at what order each sheet is in. Remember that the sheet on the bottom of the list is the one that will get drawn last. So the sheet on the top of the list will be the one that gets drawn first, and anything on a sheet below that will get drawn over the top of anything above it.
In this case, notice how the LAND sheet is above the LAND FEATURES sheet?
When you hit the redraw button, it re-drew the entire map according to the way the sheets are organized.
So how can you fix this? There are a few ways that I know of.
#1) Since you know that the hills Symbol is on the LAND sheet, you could move the LAND sheet so that it is below the LAND FEATURES sheet in the list.
To do this is simple. Put a checkmark in the sheet labelled LAND. Then click the “Move Down” button that is found right next to the list of sheets. This will move the LAND sheet down in the order they are in according to the sheets list. In this case you would want to keep going until the LAND sheet is right below the LAND FEATURES sheet.
To move it back up, make sure there is a checkmark next to the LAND sheet and click the “Move Up” button until the LAND sheet is above the LAND FEATURES sheet.
Keep in mind that when you do this, you should pay attention to where every other sheet is in comparison to the one you are moving. If you don’t you could re-arrange the symbols so that they do not overlap each other properly.
You should also keep in mind that other Symbols could be on this sheet which will also move with the sheet as you move it, thus not overlapping properly.
For this reason I do not recommend doing #1 until you get more experience with Sheets.
#2) You could make a new sheet and name it LAND HILLS and move the Hill Symbol onto it, and then move the LAND HILLS sheet right below the LAND FEATURES sheet.
Why don’t we try creating a new sheet.
To create a new sheet, simply left click on the Sheets and Effects button to and bring up the Drawing Sheets and Effects Window.
Next, left click the “Add” button that is on the left hand side of the list of sheets.
This will bring up the “Add Sheet” miniature window.
In the box below the words “New Sheet”, type in “LAND HILLS”, then left click the OK button.
Congratulations, you have just created a new sheet for your hills to go on.
Any sheet you make will initially appear at the bottom of the sheets list.
Now, left click the OK button and the Drawing Sheets and Effects window will disappear.
Next we will move the Hill Symbol to its new sheet.
To do this you would use the “Change Properties” button. It is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface in the middle of the row of buttons. It is the one that looks like a paint bucket is spilling out a bunch of color. Then right next to the bucket there is a modern day road. Please be careful here as there is another button further down that looks almost identical. But that one has the number 1 on it. If you are unsure of which button it is, hover your mouse over it. It should say “Change Properties.
Left click the “Change Properties" button now.
This will bring up a small square on the tip of your cursor. Click next to the Symbol you wish to change and make sure the box expands to cover the target Symbol. You can tell what Symbol is affected because a purple box will appear around the Symbol you have actually “grabbed” with the cursor.
When you have the hills outlined in purple, right click your mouse. This will bring up another little box with the words “Do It” at the top. Left click the Do It word. This will bring up the “Change Properties” window.
In the Change Properties window, look for the checkbox that says “Sheet” and left click it to put a checkmark in it. The drop down menu should already say LAND HILLS on it but if it does not, open the drop down menu and find it, then left click it so it is highlighted in blue, then let it close. Next, left click the OK button. The Change Properties window will close and you will have moved your Hills to the LAND HILLS sheet.
Next, open back up your Sheets and Effects window and move the LAND HILLS sheet so that it is right below the LAND FEATURES sheet on the sheet list.
Now left click the ok button.
Your Hills should now be on top of your Hills background.
Done. And the sheet is now "Land Hills." One thing worth mentioning (if it hasn't been, already) is that the square selector box needs to be on the edge of the symbol one wants to select: if you grab in the middle, you get nothing. Sometimes, with closely grouped symbols, I've found I have to zoom in quite a bit to be able to easily select.
The Foothills could also be moved to SYMBOLS Sheet, which is what I have done. I found that moving the LAND Sheet below the LAND FEATURES Sheet made the Hill Fill disappear (as I would have expected). So adding a separate Sheet, Like SYMBOLS HILLS, or LAND HILLS (I have done the former) is a better option, but remember to keep your new Sheet below the LAND FEATURES Sheet. (By 'below' I mean below in the order of Sheets as seen in the Status Bar at the top). Again, the only problem I had was with the Foothills symbols; the other Hills symbols went to the right Sheet automatically. On My Map, I have added all the Hills (and Mountains too, but more of that later, when tonnichiwa tewlls us about placement of hill and mountain symbol placement).
I've been naughty this time. I couldn't resist adding a couple more hill symbols. I chose to move them onto the SYMBOLS sheet, but I can move them again if it affects the next lesson in any way
I've just noticed qwalker, that you have some kind of weird spotty interaction between your hills and mountains background fills. Is that "transparency acne" going on there?
Barliman's comment about the difficulties in choosing particular symbols in a group on the map with the selector box, is well-made. It happens often because it's very difficult to guess where the actual border of the symbol is. It's a simple rectangle, but it has to be large enough to include the maximum dimensions of the symbol, and those aren't always as obvious as you might think with irregularly-shaped items. When you have a group of symbols together, such as clumps of separate individual hills or trees when creating a range of hills or a woodland area, for example, because you'll have placed them to look appealing, there's often a lot of overlap between these invisible "symbol edges". So picking the right one, or ones, should you need to, is a real art, and can take several attempts. Moral of the story is to get things right first time while you're mapping of course, but we're all human, so that happens only rarely (well, in my case it does...). Oh, and naturally, it's very easy to accidentally select other things while you're trying to do this too, such as a land area, a river or road, so again, watching the Command Line to see how many objects you've selected compared to how many you intended to, can be a real help. If you get really stuck, aim to select and change whatever you need to for objects only one at a time. There are other Campaign Cartographer features to help you find and select the item(s) you need as well, but I suspect those will be discussed in a later lesson, so will not say more now beyond **whispered hint - "Info" > "List"**!
Another whispered hint - make a new layer called "Protected" and put everything on it that you're absolutely happy with, and then protect it. Couldn't have done a map with 135 Sheets on it otherwise
You might try changing the scale on your bitmap fill. I have had mixed results doing that. Sometimes it works and sometimes i cannot get it to look correct.
Many frustrating hours of experimentation has shown that the edge fade inner is a surprising culprit, even if you have the inner opacity set to 100. I don't know how to cure it for standard fills. With my own textures I tend to use what I call a 'backing'. I copy the offending polygon onto a sheet immediately below the one its on, add the very same sheet effects to it, then turn the polygon solid and a mid grey tone. Its a bit like lining something. Sometimes you might need to increase the distance of the edge fade by a couple of units on the backing sheet so that you don't get a grey area around the edge of the fill, but it seems to work ok.
I'm sure that now I've said that someone else will come up with a better solution. I only created that one as a coping strategy when I started having problems with my Bloodrock map and the homemade textures in that map.
I thought at first that the textures were to blame - assuming that I had generated them with rather a lot of contrast, and that might well be the case, since the other way of dealing with it did seem to be to reduce the saturation and make them all a bit more grey than they really are. I've never seen it with any of the standard PF fills until now - on your map.
I'm coming back. Really. I reformatted my computer over the Christmas holiday and haven't had a chance to get CC3+ reinstalled and running. I'll catch up.
And thank you everyone for pointing out the issues you have with certain bits of terrain. It was interesting to read how you fixed it Loopysue. I’m sorry you are having issues with your videos Teresa, I hope things are going better for you.
Welcome back AEIOU, I don’t envy you. I’ve never liked having to re-do everything on my hard drive. Hopefully things are working better for you too.
So we left off having just laid down some hills on the hills background fill. But there is a proper way to lay down terrain and an improper one. Unfortunately, we have laid down the hills in an improper manner. But that’s ok because now we are going to fix that.
If you look at the Symbols available in your Symbol Catalog, you will notice that most of them are actually in an isometric view instead of a top down view or a flat map view. With this in mind, you must think of how to place your symbols so that they line up properly on your map. If you do not lay down your map Symbols in the right order, it can lead to a lot of work trying to fix that problem later. So it is best to just start off by laying them down properly to begin with.
So how do you lay down isometric map Symbol’s properly?
We look at where we want to place our Symbols on the map. In this case, we want to place our hill Symbols on the hills bitmap fill. So we would begin by placing our first hill Symbol somewhere at the top of the bitmap fill and working our way down the bitmap fill placing more hill symbols so they slightly overlap the ones above them.
When doing this, you want to work from left to right or from right to left, depending on what the Symbol you are placing looks like. My general rule is to let the Symbol hover on the edge of my cursor and place that cursor right where I am considering placing the next Symbol to get an idea of what it will look like if I place that Symbol in that exact spot. Sometimes the Symbol will look like it should naturally fit there, sometimes it will not. It is up to you to decide.
But our problem in the class now is that we placed our first hill Symbol at the middle point in the hill bitmap fill, not near the top.
So how do we fix this?
You have a few options. You could erase the hill Symbol and place another one at the top of the hill bitmap fill, or you could move the hill Symbol to the top of the hill bitmap fill.
To erase the hill Symbol, left click on the “Erase” button on your Campaign Cartographer User Interface. It is the button that looks like a pencil with an eraser on it on the left hand side. If you are unsure of it, hover your mouse over the button. It should say “ Erase”.
This will put a tiny box on the tip of your cursor. Now move your cursor over to the hill icon and make sure about half of that tiny box is on the actual hill Symbol and the other half is off of the hill Symbol, but not touching the edge of the hill bitmap fill.
Now left click your mouse again. This should put a purple box around your hill Symbol. This means it has been selected.
Now right click your mouse. This will bring up a window. In this window, find the part that says “Do It” and left click on it. Your hill Symbol should disappear and a white box will be left in its place.
Now move your mouse up to the "Redraw" button and left click it. The redraw button looks like it has two arrows circling around each other. It is in the upper right of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface. If you are unsure, hover your mouse over it. It should then say “Redraw”.
Your map should now be redrawn and your hill Symbol should be gone.
But I want to show you how to move your hill Symbol as well. So please left click on your “undo” button.
The “undo” button is the one that looks like an arrow going in a circle to the left. It is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface somewhere near the middle. If you are unsure of which one it is, hover your mouse over it. It should then say “undo”.
You might have to left click it a few times, especially if your prompt to autosave came up right after you clicked it the first time. Just be aware that every time you left click the undo button, you are bringing your map back to something it has done before, so be careful. If you click the undo button too many times, you risk going too far back and may destroy something you have already placed and wish to keep on your map. So I urge caution when undoing something. I always pay very close attention to my map when using undo.
Now, your hill Symbol should be back on your map.
I want you to left click on the “Move, Scale, Rotate” button. It is the button that looks like it has a square in the top left corner of the button that has dotted lines around it. In the top right of the button is an arrow pointing diagonally down to the right. Below the arrow is a solid lined square. This button is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface, right below the “Erase” button. If you are unsure, hover your mouse over it. It should read “Move, Scale, Rotate”.
Now that you have left clicked it, again, a small square should appear on your cursor, so move your cursor over and select the hill Symbol again. A purple box should appear around your hill Symbol. This tells you that it is selected, just like when we erased it.
Now right click again, just like when we erased. The same window will come up. Again, left click the words “Do It”. This will bring up the lines that cross each other again.
Now left click the hill Symbol. A white box will appear around your Symbol, but this time the hill Symbol will not disappear.
Move your cursor somewhere towards the top of the hill bitmap fill. Notice that the hill Symbol moves with your cursor and a black line points in the direction that you are moving the Symbol. This line shows you where you are going with the Symbol.
Go ahead and place that Symbol down somewhere at the top of the hill bitmap fill.
Now hit the redraw button again. The white box should disappear, the hill Symbol should now be redrawn nicely on your map, and you should be ready to place the next Symbols. Go ahead and pick some more hill Symbols and start placing them on your map over the hills bitmap fill. It is ok to leave some of the fill uncovered and it is also okay if your hills are placed so they are not all the way on the fill and bleed over the edge.
It should look something like this before you place more of the hill Symbols.
Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year Tonnichiwa!
I think I instinctively placed my hills in the right place the first time by mistake, but for any raw beginners out there I strongly recommend practicing selecting things because it can sometimes be a bit tricky. Its easy to accidentally select the hills fill beneath the hill symbol unless you steer clear of it. Clicking exactly on the top edge of the visible part of the hill symbol helps.
I had an ok Christmas and New Year, Thank you Sue.
So Dogtag has informed me of a few more ways to sort the Symbols in a program if you do not line them up properly the first time you lay them down. I will copy and paste that here.
Thank you Dogtag for these great extras to the lesson. It is very much appreciated
"Another handy feature is to have CC3+ sort your symbols for you. While it's always good to lay symbols down correctly the first time, you can select Symbols>Sort Symbols In Map from the menu bar to select the symbols you need fixed and then right-click and Do It. Alternatively, you can type SYMSORT and then press Enter rather than use the menu."
In terms of the selection of items, I'd again reiterate the point made previously to watch what your Command Line prompt tells you once you've made the selection, as this will tell you how many entities you've selected. In the case of this part of the lesson, it should just say "(1 picked)". If it says more than this, you may need to try again!
With regard to the Sort Symbols In Map command, it's worth noting that it will sort only the selected symbols, so if the symbols you're trying to correct are meant to lie "above" or "below" other symbols that also overlap them, those others too will need selecting (assuming they're on the same sheet). I've also found that sometimes, the Sort Symbols In Map command doesn't fully "work", especially with symbols like some of the Herwin Wielink mountains and hills, for example, which have colours and lines that fade away towards their edges. I think this is because that command works by using where the symbol box edges are in relation to one another. So you can end up with a hill "behind" a mountain that actually hides the nearer mountain's peak, for instance. However, that can be easily resolved by using the "Send To Back", "Send Behind", etc., buttons towards the upper right side of your CC3+ screen, on the individual symbol entity. You can find these commands also using the Edit drop-down menu, under Entity Order.
Thank you Wyvern. I have had the same problem with the Sort Symbols In Map command not actually sorting everything. That is why I trained myself to just put them in the right order to begin with. Its just easier for me to do it that way.
Since picking an entity and how difficult it can be seems to be coming up a lot, should I do a lesson on that next? before I continue with the map? What does the class think?
Posted By: tonnichiwaSince picking an entity and how difficult it can be seems to be coming up a lot, should I do a lesson on that next? before I continue with the map? What does the class think?
Thank you Sue and Barliman for answering my question.
So I haven't gotten any other responses from people. Do we still have a class? If so, is this going too slow for people? Do I need to speed it up? Are people still interested?
Comments
Before uploading, i change it to filename01. Then save as png, less lossy then jpg, and use that to post here and my sites. Of course, since I save as 1200 x 1200 pixels, I use Irfanview to lower the size before uploading to here.
By some experimentation, it appears that these 2 symbols keep the Sheet that is on the Status Bar at the time. When I changed the Sheet to COASTLINE, for example, the symbol appeared in full, but doing a Info>List command showed thet although the layer was Minerals/Mountains, the Sheet was now COASTLINE. Funny that for the other Hill symbols the sheet automatically is SYMBOLS.
I wonder why Mike Schley put the Foothills this way? I guess it can be changed individually by using the Change Properties button, but can it be changed in the Template by using the advanced options?
My Map is below.
Been playing hooky for a couple of days, so now I'm catching up. Here's one with the symbol-placing example:
I am not sure yet if you can change those two fills in the advanced options in the template but my suspicion is that you can. I guess we’ll have to look that one up in the Tome of Ultimate Mapping and see.
And thanks for posting your work guys. LOL Hooky huh Barliman? Do I need to get out the ruler? :P
Just so everyone knows, this will be the last one of these I do until after Christmas. Feel free to do this at your leisure. Merry Christmas everyone.
Now let’s dive into what happened last time.
We put hills on the fill, clicked the redraw button and our hills were partly covered by the bitmap fill of the hill background. But, why?
Well, this is because of the sheet that the Bitmap fill is on and the Sheet that the hill is on.
When I asked you to put down the hills, did you happen to look to see what sheet they were on? If not, please go look and see what sheet they are on because this will be important.
As qwalker said, the hills themselves should be on the sheet titled “LAND” and the hills background should be on the sheet titled “LAND FEATURES”.
So do you remember when I showed you how to open up the Drawing Sheets and Effects window? Please do so now.
I would like you to take a look at what order each sheet is in. Remember that the sheet on the bottom of the list is the one that will get drawn last.
So the sheet on the top of the list will be the one that gets drawn first, and anything on a sheet below that will get drawn over the top of anything above it.
In this case, notice how the LAND sheet is above the LAND FEATURES sheet?
When you hit the redraw button, it re-drew the entire map according to the way the sheets are organized.
So how can you fix this? There are a few ways that I know of.
#1) Since you know that the hills Symbol is on the LAND sheet, you could move the LAND sheet so that it is below the LAND FEATURES sheet in the list.
To do this is simple. Put a checkmark in the sheet labelled LAND. Then click the “Move Down” button that is found right next to the list of sheets. This will move the LAND sheet down in the order they are in according to the sheets list. In this case you would want to keep going until the LAND sheet is right below the LAND FEATURES sheet.
To move it back up, make sure there is a checkmark next to the LAND sheet and click the “Move Up” button until the LAND sheet is above the LAND FEATURES sheet.
Keep in mind that when you do this, you should pay attention to where every other sheet is in comparison to the one you are moving. If you don’t you could re-arrange the symbols so that they do not overlap each other properly.
You should also keep in mind that other Symbols could be on this sheet which will also move with the sheet as you move it, thus not overlapping properly.
For this reason I do not recommend doing #1 until you get more experience with Sheets.
#2) You could make a new sheet and name it LAND HILLS and move the Hill Symbol onto it, and then move the LAND HILLS sheet right below the LAND FEATURES sheet.
Why don’t we try creating a new sheet.
To create a new sheet, simply left click on the Sheets and Effects button to and bring up the Drawing Sheets and Effects Window.
Next, left click the “Add” button that is on the left hand side of the list of sheets.
This will bring up the “Add Sheet” miniature window.
In the box below the words “New Sheet”, type in “LAND HILLS”, then left click the OK button.
Congratulations, you have just created a new sheet for your hills to go on.
Any sheet you make will initially appear at the bottom of the sheets list.
Now, left click the OK button and the Drawing Sheets and Effects window will disappear.
Next we will move the Hill Symbol to its new sheet.
To do this you would use the “Change Properties” button. It is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface in the middle of the row of buttons. It is the one that looks like a paint bucket is spilling out a bunch of color. Then right next to the bucket there is a modern day road. Please be careful here as there is another button further down that looks almost identical. But that one has the number 1 on it. If you are unsure of which button it is, hover your mouse over it. It should say “Change Properties.
Left click the “Change Properties" button now.
This will bring up a small square on the tip of your cursor. Click next to the Symbol you wish to change and make sure the box expands to cover the target Symbol. You can tell what Symbol is affected because a purple box will appear around the Symbol you have actually “grabbed” with the cursor.
When you have the hills outlined in purple, right click your mouse. This will bring up another little box with the words “Do It” at the top.
Left click the Do It word. This will bring up the “Change Properties” window.
In the Change Properties window, look for the checkbox that says “Sheet” and left click it to put a checkmark in it. The drop down menu should already say LAND HILLS on it but if it does not, open the drop down menu and find it, then left click it so it is highlighted in blue, then let it close.
Next, left click the OK button. The Change Properties window will close and you will have moved your Hills to the LAND HILLS sheet.
Next, open back up your Sheets and Effects window and move the LAND HILLS sheet so that it is right below the LAND FEATURES sheet on the sheet list.
Now left click the ok button.
Your Hills should now be on top of your Hills background.
It should look something like this:
I'm sure that now I've said that someone else will come up with a better solution. I only created that one as a coping strategy when I started having problems with my Bloodrock map and the homemade textures in that map.
I thought at first that the textures were to blame - assuming that I had generated them with rather a lot of contrast, and that might well be the case, since the other way of dealing with it did seem to be to reduce the saturation and make them all a bit more grey than they really are. I've never seen it with any of the standard PF fills until now - on your map.
I'm having some problems with my laptop, so I will restart posting my videos of the class as soon as I can.
And thank you everyone for pointing out the issues you have with certain bits of terrain. It was interesting to read how you fixed it Loopysue.
I’m sorry you are having issues with your videos Teresa, I hope things are going better for you.
Welcome back AEIOU, I don’t envy you. I’ve never liked having to re-do everything on my hard drive. Hopefully things are working better for you too.
So we left off having just laid down some hills on the hills background fill. But there is a proper way to lay down terrain and an improper one. Unfortunately, we have laid down the hills in an improper manner. But that’s ok because now we are going to fix that.
If you look at the Symbols available in your Symbol Catalog, you will notice that most of them are actually in an isometric view instead of a top down view or a flat map view. With this in mind, you must think of how to place your symbols so that they line up properly on your map. If you do not lay down your map Symbols in the right order, it can lead to a lot of work trying to fix that problem later. So it is best to just start off by laying them down properly to begin with.
So how do you lay down isometric map Symbol’s properly?
We look at where we want to place our Symbols on the map. In this case, we want to place our hill Symbols on the hills bitmap fill. So we would begin by placing our first hill Symbol somewhere at the top of the bitmap fill and working our way down the bitmap fill placing more hill symbols so they slightly overlap the ones above them.
When doing this, you want to work from left to right or from right to left, depending on what the Symbol you are placing looks like. My general rule is to let the Symbol hover on the edge of my cursor and place that cursor right where I am considering placing the next Symbol to get an idea of what it will look like if I place that Symbol in that exact spot. Sometimes the Symbol will look like it should naturally fit there, sometimes it will not. It is up to you to decide.
But our problem in the class now is that we placed our first hill Symbol at the middle point in the hill bitmap fill, not near the top.
So how do we fix this?
You have a few options. You could erase the hill Symbol and place another one at the top of the hill bitmap fill, or you could move the hill Symbol to the top of the hill bitmap fill.
To erase the hill Symbol, left click on the “Erase” button on your Campaign Cartographer User Interface. It is the button that looks like a pencil with an eraser on it on the left hand side. If you are unsure of it, hover your mouse over the button. It should say “ Erase”.
This will put a tiny box on the tip of your cursor. Now move your cursor over to the hill icon and make sure about half of that tiny box is on the actual hill Symbol and the other half is off of the hill Symbol, but not touching the edge of the hill bitmap fill.
Now left click your mouse again. This should put a purple box around your hill Symbol. This means it has been selected.
Now right click your mouse. This will bring up a window. In this window, find the part that says “Do It” and left click on it.
Your hill Symbol should disappear and a white box will be left in its place.
Now move your mouse up to the "Redraw" button and left click it. The redraw button looks like it has two arrows circling around each other. It is in the upper right of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface. If you are unsure, hover your mouse over it. It should then say “Redraw”.
Your map should now be redrawn and your hill Symbol should be gone.
But I want to show you how to move your hill Symbol as well. So please left click on your “undo” button.
The “undo” button is the one that looks like an arrow going in a circle to the left. It is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface somewhere near the middle. If you are unsure of which one it is, hover your mouse over it. It should then say “undo”.
You might have to left click it a few times, especially if your prompt to autosave came up right after you clicked it the first time. Just be aware that every time you left click the undo button, you are bringing your map back to something it has done before, so be careful. If you click the undo button too many times, you risk going too far back and may destroy something you have already placed and wish to keep on your map. So I urge caution when undoing something. I always pay very close attention to my map when using undo.
Now, your hill Symbol should be back on your map.
I want you to left click on the “Move, Scale, Rotate” button. It is the button that looks like it has a square in the top left corner of the button that has dotted lines around it. In the top right of the button is an arrow pointing diagonally down to the right. Below the arrow is a solid lined square.
This button is located on the left hand side of your Campaign Cartographer User Interface, right below the “Erase” button. If you are unsure, hover your mouse over it. It should read “Move, Scale, Rotate”.
Now that you have left clicked it, again, a small square should appear on your cursor, so move your cursor over and select the hill Symbol again.
A purple box should appear around your hill Symbol. This tells you that it is selected, just like when we erased it.
Now right click again, just like when we erased. The same window will come up. Again, left click the words “Do It”.
This will bring up the lines that cross each other again.
Now left click the hill Symbol. A white box will appear around your Symbol, but this time the hill Symbol will not disappear.
Move your cursor somewhere towards the top of the hill bitmap fill. Notice that the hill Symbol moves with your cursor and a black line points in the direction that you are moving the Symbol. This line shows you where you are going with the Symbol.
Go ahead and place that Symbol down somewhere at the top of the hill bitmap fill.
Now hit the redraw button again. The white box should disappear, the hill Symbol should now be redrawn nicely on your map, and you should be ready to place the next Symbols. Go ahead and pick some more hill Symbols and start placing them on your map over the hills bitmap fill. It is ok to leave some of the fill uncovered and it is also okay if your hills are placed so they are not all the way on the fill and bleed over the edge.
It should look something like this before you place more of the hill Symbols.
I think I instinctively placed my hills in the right place the first time by mistake, but for any raw beginners out there I strongly recommend practicing selecting things because it can sometimes be a bit tricky. Its easy to accidentally select the hills fill beneath the hill symbol unless you steer clear of it. Clicking exactly on the top edge of the visible part of the hill symbol helps.
So Dogtag has informed me of a few more ways to sort the Symbols in a program if you do not line them up properly the first time you lay them down. I will copy and paste that here.
Thank you Dogtag for these great extras to the lesson. It is very much appreciated
"Another handy feature is to have CC3+ sort your symbols for you. While it's always good to lay symbols down correctly the first time, you can select Symbols>Sort Symbols In Map from the menu bar to select the symbols you need fixed and then right-click and Do It. Alternatively, you can type SYMSORT and then press Enter rather than use the menu."
With regard to the Sort Symbols In Map command, it's worth noting that it will sort only the selected symbols, so if the symbols you're trying to correct are meant to lie "above" or "below" other symbols that also overlap them, those others too will need selecting (assuming they're on the same sheet). I've also found that sometimes, the Sort Symbols In Map command doesn't fully "work", especially with symbols like some of the Herwin Wielink mountains and hills, for example, which have colours and lines that fade away towards their edges. I think this is because that command works by using where the symbol box edges are in relation to one another. So you can end up with a hill "behind" a mountain that actually hides the nearer mountain's peak, for instance. However, that can be easily resolved by using the "Send To Back", "Send Behind", etc., buttons towards the upper right side of your CC3+ screen, on the individual symbol entity. You can find these commands also using the Edit drop-down menu, under Entity Order.
Since picking an entity and how difficult it can be seems to be coming up a lot, should I do a lesson on that next? before I continue with the map? What does the class think?
Thank you Sue and Barliman for answering my question.
So I haven't gotten any other responses from people. Do we still have a class? If so, is this going too slow for people? Do I need to speed it up? Are people still interested?